to God.  In his last work, “The Laws,” wherein he designs a theocratic state, which has striking points of resemblance with the Jewish polity, he says:  “The conclusion of the matter is this, which is the fairest and truest of all sayings, that for the good man to sacrifice and hold converse with the Deity by means of prayers and service of every kind is the noblest thing of all and the most conducive to a happy life, and above all things fitting."[235]

This is typical of Plato’s attitude towards life in his old age; and further, his metaphysical system of monistic idealism is the most remarkable approach to Hebrew monotheism which the Greek world made.  The Patristic writers in the first centuries of the Christian era were so struck by this Hebraism in the Greek thinker, that they attributed it to direct borrowing.  Aristobulus had written of a translation of the Pentateuch older than the Septuagint, which Plato was supposed to have studied.  Clement called him the Hebrew philosopher, Origen and Augustine comment on his agreement with Genesis, and think that when he was in Egypt he listened to Jeremiah.[236] Eusebius worked out in detail his correspondences with the Bible.  Some early neo-Platonist, perhaps Numenius, declared that Plato was only the Attic Moses; and in more modern times the Cambridge Platonists of the sixteenth century harbored similar ideas, and Nietzsche spoke bitterly of the day when “Plato went to school with the Jews in Egypt.”

Of Philo, then, we may say, as Montaigne said of himself, that he was a Platonist before he knew who Plato was.  Yet he was the first Hellenistic Jew who perceived the fundamental harmony between the philosopher’s idealism and Jewish monotheism, and he was the first important commentator of Plato who developed the religious teaching of his master into a powerful spiritual force.

It is true that the seeds of neo-Platonism, i.e., the religious re-interpretation of Platonism under the influence of Eastern thought, had been sown already; and Philo must have received from his environment to some extent the mystical version of the master’s system, with its goal of ecstatic union with God, and its tendency to asceticism as a means thereto.  But the earlier products of the movement had been crude, and had lacked a powerful moving spirit.  This was provided by Philo when he introduced his overmastering conception of God.  The popular saying, “Either Plato Philonizes or Philo Platonizes"[237] contains a deep truth in its first as well as in its second part.  It not only marks the likeness in style of the two writers, but it suggests that Philo, on the one hand, made fruitful the religious germ in Plato’s teaching by his Hebraism, and, on the other, nourished the philosophical seed in Judaism by his Platonism.  Plato’s teaching falls into two main classes, the dialectical and the mythical, and it is with the latter that Philo is in specially close connection.  For in his myths Plato tries