The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory, with a General Bibliography of Philo

70 PHILO'S POLITICS

hence that no one should abandon public life for ascetic individualism.

Or Philo may reverse it and represent applied virtue as the best intro­

duction to the more metaphysical virtue of the ascetic. From the latter

point of view he insists:

Truth would properly blame those who without examination abandon the

transactions and business activity of civic life and profess to despise fame and

pleasure. For they are pretending, and do not really despise these things;

they are only putting forward their filthiness, their somberness, and their

austere and squalid way of living as a bait, on the pretext that they are lovers

of propriety and self-control and patient endurance.^28

Any person of acumen, he continues, can readily see through their pre­

tense, and will challenge their hypocrisy, which is revealed in their se­

cretly lending money, taking opportunities for indulgence, and curry­

ing favor with men in authority. So he goes on:

You have ridiculed civic life (noAiT£ia), perhaps because you have not recog­

nized how serviceable it is. You should first exercise and train yourself in the

private and public affairs of life, and become yourselves politicians and house­

hold managers by means of the kindred virtues, the household managing

and the political virtues; then, when you have in great abundance equipped

yourself, go on to the departure into another and better life. For it is good to

fight through the practical life before the contemplative life, as a sort of pre­

liminary combat before the more advanced struggle.^29... And in general it

is necessary that those who think fit to lay claim to the divine SiKaia should

first fulfill the human SiKaia. First it is great folly for those who are unable

to compass the less to suppose that they can achieve the greater. Accordingly

seek first the virtue which exists among men, that you may be established in

the virtue which looks to God.^30.. • "Flee into Mesopotamia," that is into

the middle of the swollen river of life, and take heed lest you be swept away

and drowned; rather stand absolutely rigid, and repel with might the tor­

rent of concerns as it pours in upon you from above, from either side, and

from everywhere.^31

Philo speaks^32 with sharp disapproval of the men who

live alone by themselves as though they were in a desert or were disembodied
souls; men who recognize neither city nor village nor household nor any or-

28. Fug., 33. Colson and Whitaker translate the phrase xac; iv xqi noXixixfy ptcp JtoavM-a-
    xeiag xal rtOQitfUotic;, "the business and financial side of a citizen's life." The context seems to
    me to imply a wider range of meaning in the 7tQay\ia%ziaq.


29. Ibid., 35 f. 30. Ibid., 38.


30. Ibid., 49. 32. Mig., 90; cf. Immut., 16-19.