82 PHILO'S POLITICS
(483^), where the contention is that law is made by the timid majority
to protect themselves from the aggressiveness of a powerful few. But I
cannot see any deep similarity; quite the reverse, it seems to me that
Philo is as far as possible from the position of Callicles, and that it is
such men as he and the tyrannies they advocated which Philo was most
especially denouncing. Callicles wanted the strong man free to express
his selfishness to the full, and so he disliked civic law. Philo thought
that law was perverted more by selfish tyrants than by any other one
force in society, and classed democratic legislation with the laws of
tyrants only because he felt that the weak individuals in the multitude
were largely kept from tyrannical extravagances by their weakness
rather than by any virtuous scruples. It is the selfish ambition of man
against man, including the tyrant against his fellows, of tribe against
tribe, state against state, which makes it impossible for true law to exist
in cities.
The actual facts of civic life were thus grim, and it was these facts
which made Philo sympathize with the ascetics who felt that the only
solution was to run away. Yet the city is truly a product of the Logos,
and as such it has great ideal possibilities. For all his realistic descrip
tions of society as it was, he was certain that if the commonwealth were
properly organized it had all the inspiring and educating possibilities
for the individual which Plato saw in it. States with a fine constitution,
he says, teach the primary virtues, intelligence, justice, and piety.^90 He
has the figure so familiar in Plato that the law of the city, when right,
is a physician prescribing what is beneficial for the people even if it is
distasteful.^91 He tells how the cities of Palestine came into existence:
originally a farming people, living scattered on their holdings, in course
of time the Jews were brought together by increasing social feeling and
friendliness (Koivuvia Kai $iAta), and built cities.^92 Such a process he does
not here regard to be unique with the Jews, for he describes it as "quite
what was to have been expected," though it was the absence of precisely
these virtues which made city life in general appear to him in other
moods to be the source of civic turmoil and lawlessness.
So, aside from Philo's own natural gregariousness, there was a theo
retical value to the city: if it could by wise leadership be made to con
form to its possibilities it was in itself one of the most powerful of all
influences for good among men. Hence his demand that the philoso-
- Praem., 66. 91. Jos., 63, 75 ff. 92. Spec, ii, 119.