Philo of Alexandria

Philo was born around 15 BCE in Alexandria, the largest and most cosmopolitan city of the eastern Mediterranean and home to the biggest Jewish community outside Judea ^[1]. His family ranked among the wealthiest in the city. His brother Alexander held the office of alabarch, a position connected with customs collection on the Nile, and lent enormous sums to members of the Herodian dynasty ^[2]. The family held Roman citizenship, a rare privilege for Jews of the period, and moved comfortably in both Jewish and Greco-Roman circles.

Anyone asking who was Philo of Alexandria has to begin with this double inheritance. He received a thorough Greek education of the kind available to elite Alexandrians: grammar, rhetoric, geometry, music, and above all philosophy ^[3]. At the same time he was raised in the practice of Judaism and knew the Torah intimately, though in its Greek translation, the Septuagint, rather than in Hebrew. Scholars generally doubt that he read Hebrew with any fluency; his biblical quotations and etymologies consistently follow the Greek text ^[1].

Alexandria itself formed him. The city held the famous Library and Museum, a tradition of textual scholarship, and schools where Platonic, Stoic, and Pythagorean ideas circulated freely. Alexandrian Jews before Philo had already begun interpreting scripture philosophically, and fragments of the earlier exegete Aristobulus show the method in embryo ^[4]. Philo inherited this local tradition and carried it further than anyone before him.

Nothing suggests that Philo sought public office as a young man. In his own writings he describes philosophy and the contemplation of scripture as his true calling, and he speaks with regret of the political duties that later pulled him away from study ^[3]. He mentions travels, including a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, which he made at least once, but Alexandria remained his home for his entire life ^[1].

His prominence grew from writing. Over several decades he produced a vast body of treatises in polished Greek, most of them commentaries on the Pentateuch. Ancient lists and surviving manuscripts preserve dozens of works, usually grouped into three great series: the Allegorical Commentary, a verse-by-verse philosophical exposition of Genesis; the Exposition of the Law, a more accessible presentation of Mosaic legislation and the lives of the patriarchs; and Questions and Answers on Genesis and Exodus, preserved largely in Armenian translation ^[5].

He also wrote free-standing philosophical essays, such as On the Eternity of the World and Every Good Man Is Free, and historical or apologetic works defending the Jewish community. The sheer scale of this output, and the confidence with which it addresses both Jewish and Greek audiences, made him the leading intellectual voice of Alexandrian Judaism in his generation ^[4].

Any account of Philo of Alexandria achievements starts with his method of allegorical interpretation. Philo treated the narratives of the Torah as carrying two levels of meaning: a literal sense, which he usually respected, and a deeper symbolic sense in which characters and events represent states of the soul ^[1]. Abraham's migration becomes the mind's journey away from sense perception toward knowledge of God. Egypt stands for the body and its passions. This approach allowed him to argue that Moses had anticipated the best insights of Greek philosophy, and that scripture, rightly read, was itself the highest philosophy ^[3].

His single most influential idea was his account of the Logos, the divine Word or Reason. For Philo, God in his essence is utterly transcendent and beyond human comprehension. The Logos acts as the intermediary: the instrument through which God created the world, the pattern containing the Platonic ideas, and the means by which the human mind can approach the divine ^[6]. Philo even calls the Logos a "second god" in one passage, language that startled later readers. When the Gospel of John opened with "In the beginning was the Word," it drew on a conceptual vocabulary that Philo had done more than anyone to develop, whether or not the evangelist read him directly ^[4].

Philo also fused Jewish ethics with Greek moral philosophy. He presented the Ten Commandments as headings under which all the special laws could be organized, an original structural insight, and he described the virtues of the patriarchs in Stoic terms while insisting that true virtue depends on God rather than human self-sufficiency ^[5]. Among Philo of Alexandria facts worth stressing is that he is also a historical witness of the first importance: his treatise On the Contemplative Life gives the only substantial ancient description of the Therapeutae, an ascetic Jewish community near Lake Mareotis, and his political writings document Roman rule in Egypt from the inside ^[2].

In 38 CE Alexandria erupted. During a visit by the Judean king Herod Agrippa, Greek mobs, with the connivance of the Roman prefect Aulus Avillius Flaccus, attacked the Jewish quarters, desecrated synagogues by installing images of the emperor, and killed many residents. Philo recorded these events in two surviving treatises, Against Flaccus and On the Embassy to Gaius, which remain primary sources for the first recorded urban pogrom against a Jewish community ^[2].

The Jewish community chose Philo, by then an elderly and respected figure, to lead a delegation of five to the emperor Gaius Caligula in Rome. The mission, undertaken in 39 or 40 CE, sought confirmation of Jewish civic rights and exemption from the imperial cult ^[7]. Philo's own narrative describes the humiliation of the audience: Caligula, who took his own divinity seriously, mocked the envoys, wandered through his gardens inspecting building works while they trailed behind, and asked why Jews refused to eat pork. The embassy achieved nothing during Caligula's lifetime ^[2].

Events resolved the crisis instead. Caligula was assassinated in January 41 CE, and his successor Claudius issued rulings that restored Jewish religious rights in Alexandria while ordering both communities to keep the peace ^[7]. Philo's account of the episode, written afterward, presents the tyrant's fall as divine justice, and it gives historians a rare eyewitness picture of Roman imperial politics from a provincial subject's point of view.

Philo says little directly about his private circumstances, and no ancient biography of him survives, so his family connections must be pieced together from his works, from Josephus, and from papyri ^[1]. He appears to have married, and he writes about marriage and household life with the perspective of experience, but the name of his wife is unknown and no children are recorded.

His wider family, by contrast, is unusually well documented. His brother Alexander the Alabarch was among the richest men in the Roman East and financed the gold and silver plating of nine gates of the Jerusalem Temple ^[2]. Alexander's son Marcus Julius Alexander married Berenice, daughter of King Herod Agrippa I. Another nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, abandoned Jewish observance, rose through the Roman administration, served as procurator of Judea and prefect of Egypt, and eventually supported Vespasian's bid for the imperial throne ^[7]. The contrast between the philosopher devoted to the law of Moses and the nephew who left it behind illustrates the pressures on elite Jews in the Roman world.

Philo's temperament comes through in his prose. He describes the life of study as a kind of sober intoxication, praises retreat and contemplation, and complains that civic business drags the soul down into a sea of cares ^[3]. Yet he was no recluse: his writings show detailed knowledge of the theater, athletic contests, banquets, and law courts of Alexandria, all of which he attended and observed.

The embassy to Caligula is the last securely dated event of Philo's life. He refers to himself at that time as an old man, gray-haired and long past the season of ambition ^[2]. After returning to Alexandria he continued writing; On the Embassy to Gaius itself was composed after Caligula's death in 41 CE and probably under Claudius.

He is generally thought to have died around 45 CE in his native city, though no source records the circumstances ^[1]. The fourth-century church historian Eusebius of Caesarea preserved a tradition that Philo met the apostle Peter in Rome, a claim modern scholars reject as legend, but one that reveals how eagerly early Christians claimed him ^[8].

That Christian embrace determined the survival of his books. Rabbinic Judaism, developing after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, took a different path, centered on Hebrew and on legal interpretation, and Philo went unmentioned in rabbinic literature for well over a millennium. Christian scribes in the catechetical school of Alexandria, especially Clement and Origen, studied and copied him, and it is through church libraries that nearly all of his roughly three dozen surviving treatises reached the modern world ^[4].

Philo's afterlife is one of the stranger stories in intellectual history. The thinker who wrote entirely as a loyal Jew became, in effect, an honorary church father. Origen carried Philo's methods from Alexandria to Caesarea, Ambrose of Milan reworked whole passages of his exegesis in Latin, and the allegorical reading of scripture that dominated Christian interpretation for a thousand years descends in large part from him ^[8]. Some medieval manuscripts even styled him "Philo the Bishop." Within Judaism he was recovered only in the sixteenth century, when the Italian scholar Azariah de' Rossi examined his works and weighed, cautiously, whether they could be reclaimed ^[4].

For historians of philosophy, Philo marks a turning point. He is the earliest author whose surviving works systematically combine biblical monotheism with Platonic metaphysics, and some scholars treat him as a forerunner of Middle Platonism and, more distantly, of Neoplatonism ^[6]. Debates continue over how original he was, since most Alexandrian Jewish writing before him is lost, but no earlier figure shows the synthesis on anything like his scale.

Modern study of Philo is a substantial academic field, with a dedicated annual, the Studia Philonica Annual, critical editions in Greek, and a steady stream of monographs ^[5]. Readers who come to a Philo of Alexandria biography today find a figure valuable on three fronts at once: a philosopher wrestling with how a transcendent God relates to the world, a historian's witness to Roman Alexandria and the crisis of 38 to 41 CE, and the pioneering example of a believer explaining an ancient scripture in the intellectual language of his own age.