68 PHILO'S POLITICS
had become an old man, as he was when he went to Gaius, this would
mean, presumably, that his great corpus was composed in the off mo
ments of a generally harassed old age, a supposition which its bulk
makes impossible. What the passage tells us is that Philo spent a time
in his youth as a recluse (probably with the Therapeutae), but felt that
his people needed him so much that he returned to them, and there
after consoled himself during his leisure hours with writing about the
mystic message of the Scriptures, while be devoted his main career to
public service.
The question is how much Philo really repented the necessity of liv
ing a busy life with men. Our most important single passage for answer
ing it is the following:For many a time have I myself forsaken friends and kinsfolk and country
and come into a wilderness, to give my attention to some subject demanding
contemplation, and derived no advantage from doing so, but my mind scat
tered or bitten by passion has gone off to matters of the contrary kind. Some
times, on the other hand, amid a vast throng I have a collected mind. God
has dispersed the crowd that besets the soul and taught me that a favorable
and unfavorable condition are not brought about by differences of place, but
by God who moves and leads the car of the soul in whatever way he pleases.^22
That is, in one of the few passages where Philo speaks of himself he
represents his life in the crowd as the supreme tragedy of his life, while
in another he says that place makes no difference whatever, and that he
is more apt to find his mystical abstraction in the midst of the crowd
than in the solitude of the desert. The conflict in Philo's mind was
deeper than mere indecision about the value of solitude: it went on
until at one time he would think of man as a rounded being, whose full
career could not be achieved without a fructification of the spiritual in
the physical and social realms, and at another that man could be per
fect only as he renounced the material side of human nature, and cen
tered himself as abstractedly as possible in God. It was because of this
conflict that in one mood Philo praised the state, in another denounced
it, while his political theory seems at first as unstable as his emotions.
This chapter will be concerned with Philo's different statements about
society.
A definite part of man's nature is its social side. Man is, says Philo, a- LA, ii, 85.