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

STATESMAN AND PHILOSOPHER 77

other for their injustice according the ordering of time." It is utterly in­

compatible with the Stoic cycle of the Logos as the "great year." For in

Philo's statement the Logos flux involves a single and eternal phenome­

non in which individual foci of predominance emerge and disappear

while the Logos keeps everything as a whole in a democracy, that is, in

a state of balance. The Stoic notion, on the contrary, saw the Logos de­

velop into a great manifestation of phenomena, and then dissolve into

the original oneness in the course of stated epochs. The movement was

one of transition of the Logos as a whole with the Stoics: here it is the

temporary emergence of parts, and their levelling again as the flux

throws out new wave crests. The sea of Logos remains fundamentally

unchanged by the temporary rise of a wave. We know that Heraclitus

tied up his theory with politics,^66 though the fragments are too scanty

for us to have any notion as to how far he developed his thought. Since

Philo has in other points betrayed a knowledge of Heraclitean tradition

quite beyond our ordinary sources of information about that tradition,^67

it is entirely possible that this highly important passage should be re­

garded as a reliable bit of Heraclitean teaching. So I regard it myself,

though, in the absence of reference to Heraclitus, proof is not to be

attempted.

To Philo, then, whether the notion came to him from Heraclitus or

not, an individual state was a temporary phenomenon in the great flux

of Logos. Since Philo was not, we know well, a materialist in his con­

ceptions of Logos, though he followed the original association of Logos
with Law to be found in the Heraclitean fragments, he seems to have
considered that the divine Logos, which was in itself a great immaterial
formative force and law, was subject to temporary concentrations out of
which grew great empires. None of these concentrations had either cos­

mic or permanent significance. From the point of view of the world of
phenomena, the emergence of a particular empire was comparable to
the election of an individual citizen to office. Translated into the lan­
guage of Roman statecraft, the cosmic imperium could be entrusted to
an individual nation for a term, as that nation dominated all men for a

time, although the cosmic imperium was itself the prerogative of the
Logos, the body politic. But I am sure that this conception did not affect
Philo's more usual thought that from the point of view of the universe

66. See especially his Fragment 91 (Bywater).


67. See my "Neo-Pythagorean Source," Yale Classical Studies, III (1932), 155 ff.