STATESMAN AND PHILOSOPHER 7i
ganization of men whatever, and despise, in their quest of naked and ab
stract truth, the things prized by the mob.Such people, he explains, go against the plain teaching of Scripture not
to despise customs and laws founded by excellent men of old. He quotes
the Peripatetic doctrine, the same doctrine as was used by Pythagoreans
in their legislation, that the goods of life are of three kinds, spiritual,
bodily, and external, and apparently approves these as necessary to a
man's living a full life.^33 He points out that the Jewish Law is divided
like the Decalogue into two tables, one concerned with piety and holi
ness to God, the other with justice to men and brotherly love. The one
is the task of the soul, the other of the body, so that the true life com
bines both the theoretical and practical. In doing each alike, then, man
is following the highest Law.^34
This attitude seems a reflection of a common one in Philo's day; for
Dio Chrysostom develops the same position at length in his oration nepl
avaxwpy)0£(jc,^35 where, although Dio recognizes that the philosopher
must have quiet for his meditations (§11), yet he sees the fruit of phi
losophy in an ability to face practical life (§14), and sums up his argu
ment by saying that his purpose has been to show that the soul must be
accustomed to perform its duties and carry on its cogitations every
where, both in complete confusion and in total quiet. Otherwise loneli
ness and quiet have nothing especial to offer men to protect them from
thinking or erring in every sort of anomalous way (§26).
In the passages quoted Philo is quite as specific as Dio in asserting the
value, indeed the necessity, of attention to society and public affairs. But
in other passages Philo takes diametrically the opposite point of view.
The contrast comes out most clearly when Philo, speaking from his
heart to Jews in the Allegory, compares the philosophy of Joseph with
that of his brothers.
It is to counteract the false elements in Joseph's thinking and nature,
says Philo, that Jacob sends him to find his brothers. For Joseph's char
acter up to this point, it will be recalled, had been revealed in his many-
colored cloak, which signified that he was "an exponent of a doctrine
full of mazes and hard to disentangle." It is with an eye to statecraft
rather than to truth that Joseph moulds his theories of the three sorts of
goods, the external, the bodily, and the psychic.
33» QG, iii, 16; on this see Brdhier, Les Idees, 18, 260. 34. Spec., ii, 63 f.- Orat., xx, ed. de Bude", II, 324-334. See Brehier, Les Idees, 268.