of the second and third centuries.  They lived at a time when it had been proved that that movement led away from Judaism, and its main tenets had been adopted or perverted by an antagonistic creed.  It was a tragic necessity which compelled the severance between the Eastern and Western developments of the religion.  In Philo’s day the breach was already threatened, through the anti-legal tendencies of the extreme allegorists.  His own aim was to maintain the catholic tradition of Judaism, while at the same time expounding the Torah according to the conceptions of ancient philosophy.  Unfortunately, the balance was not preserved by those who followed him, and the branch of Judaism that had blossomed forth so fruitfully fell off from the parent tree.  But till the middle of the first century of the common era the Alexandrian and the Palestinian developments of Jewish culture were complementary:  on the one side there was legal, on the other, philosophical expansion.  Moreover, the Judaeo-Alexandrian school, though, through its abandonment of the Hebrew tongue, it lies outside the main stream of Judaism, was an immense force in the religious history of the world, and Philo, its greatest figure, stands out in our annals as the embodiment of the Jewish religious mission, which is to preach to the nations the knowledge of the one God, and the law of righteousness.

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II

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PHILO

“The hero,” says Carlyle, “can be poet, prophet, king, priest, or what you will, according to the kind of world he finds himself born into."[39] The Jews have not been a great political people, but their excellence has been a peculiar spiritual development:  and therefore most of their heroes have been men of thought rather than action, writers rather than statesmen, men whose influence has been greater on posterity than upon their own generation.  Of Philo’s life we know one incident in very full detail, the rest we can only reconstruct from stray hints in his writings, and a few short notices of the commentators.  From that incident also, which we know to have taken place in the year 40 C.E., we can fix the general chronology of his life and works.  He speaks of himself as an old man in relating it, so that his birth may be safely placed at about 20 B.C.E.  The first part of his life therefore was passed during the tranquil era in which Augustus and Tiberius were reorganizing the Roman Empire after a half-century of war; but he was fated to see more troublesome times for his people, when the emperor Gaius, for a miserable eight years, harassed the world with his mad escapades.  In the riots which ensued upon the attempt to deprive the Jews of their religious freedom his brother the alabarch was imprisoned;[40] and he himself was called upon to champion the Alexandrian community in its hour of need.  Although the ascent of the stupid but