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

84 PHILO'S POLITICS
a colony, but their way is to come to earthly nature as tourists who desire only
to see and learn. So when they have stayed a while in their bodies and be­
held through them all that sense and mortality has to show, they make their
way back to the place from which they set out at the first. To them the heav­
enly region, where their citizenship lies, is their native land; the earthly re­
gion in which they became sojourners is a foreign country. For surely, when
men found a colony, the land which receives them becomes a native land in­
stead of the mother city, but for tourists the land which sent them forth is
still the mother to whom also they long to return.^95

The same contrast appears elsewhere, especially in De Opificio

Mundi?^6 where, over against the material world, stands the Logos, of
which the world is an imitation, while the Logos itself is an imitation
of God, so that this world, for Philo as for Augustine, is an imitation of
an imitation. And not only are the general notions the same; Leisegang
has parallels with Augustine for almost every Philonic term in this dis­

cussion. Also he shows close parallels in other matters: of the angels,

who, with God, are citizens of the higher world; in the way both

writers connect the heavenly city with the Garden of Eden, or Para­

dise; in the way both consider men to be of three types according to

the three worlds, and in the identification of the Epicureans with those

who live in the lower world, the Stoics with those in the middle world,
along with the obvious implication that the higher world, the world of
Forms and immateriality, was the world of the Platonists.
Leisegang has compared Philo and Augustine on many points, but in
general has contented himself with paralleling the "Grundgedanke" of

the two, and says, reasonably, that to work out the comparison in all
details would require an extended study. He closes his article by asking
how Augustine, who knew no Greek to speak of, could have got this
idea, and with such richness of detail, from Philo. His answer is con­
vincing: Augustine was the convert and pupil of Ambrose, who, more

than any other Latin writer was steeped in Philo, even to the point of
having been called Philo latinus. Indeed it had been Ambrose's Philonic
allegories of the Old Testament which had first broken through Au­
gustine's Manichaeism. Leisegang goes on and briefly shows that the
"Grundgedanke," with a great deal of the detail common to Augustine

95. Conf., 77, 78. Philo seems here especially to have in mind the "city of the body*' as the
    lower city, not the civic organization. He probably is including both in the material as con­
    trasted with the immaterial.


96. Opif., 16-25. Cf. Prov., ii, 55; Som., i, 46; LA, iii, 1 ff.