76 PHILO'S POLITICS
at all, one completely lost in self interest: but none the less a man en
grossed in practical problems to the exclusion of higher interests was
essentially inferior to the man who lived for higher things. So com
mitted was Philo to those "higher" things, the mystic quest, that he at
times begrudged all contact with material and social existence. But the
fully rounded man, as it has appeared frequently in the exposition of
the Mystery,^62 returns from the Mystery to be a guide to his fellows.
Society, never to be an end in itself for any man, called the mystic with
all the compulsion of noblesse oblige to dedicate the fruit of his spir
itual experience to the beneficent regulation of the lives of others.^63
Philo has little to say on the nature and value of the organized state as
such. Cities or states are not entirely human creations. At least they are
subject in their rise and fall to "what the common multitude of men
call Fortune." Tux/], however, did not belong in Philo's philosophy; she
was much too uncontrolled a deity to be adjusted to his monotheism.
Instead, in a very significant passage, he calls the majestic roll of the
world's dominant powers, Greece, Macedonia, Persia, Parthia, Egypt,
Ethiopia, Carthage, Libya, and Pontus, each of which, except the then
powerful Parthia, has had to decline. This is not chance, he says, but a
manifestation of a great cyclic movement in the Logos (xop^uei yap £v
KUKACJ Aoyoc 6 Gdoc). The Logoswhich is in constant flux (ael peuv) makes distribution city by city, nation
by nation, country by country. What these had once, those have now. What
all had, all have. Only from time to time are the possessions of each ex
changed back and forth, to the end that the inhabited world might as a whole
be like a single state and enjoy the best of constitutions, a democracy.^64
This is a purely Heraclitean formulation, combined with the idea in the
puzzling fragment of Anaximander^65 that the things which come into
existence and pass away "make reparation and satisfaction to one an-- See, e.g., By Light, Light, 230 ff. For example Philo says of Abraham: "For the nature
which is pious is also kindly, and the same person will exhibit both qualities, holiness to God
and justice to man": Abr., 208. Cf. QG, iii, 42, and Geiger, 7-17, who, as usual, is looking so
earnestly for Stoic parallels that he misses the meaning of much of his material. - It is interesting that in one passage (Sacr., 78 f.) Philo seems to foreshadow the Matthean
form of the logion to the rich young man. The contrast is between the good on the level of
ordinary life, and on that of the "perfect," or of one aspiring for perfection. Philo's whole vacil
lation, like that of his age, shows how much the medieval attitude was predetermined by the
problems of life in the tempestuous hellenistic world, before Christianity and long before the
declining days of Rome. - Immut., 173-176. 65. Diels, Frag. Vorso., Anaximandros, 9.