Appendix C: Could Philo Have Been One of the Philosophers?

Philo has many words, phrases, and images in common with the philosopher:

1. Philo uses the image at least four times of “swaddling-clothes” to describe education (i.e., from the cradle): critics cite only On Drunkenness 198, where the context is not political but cultural. In 49-51 of the same work Philo censures those who, failing to go through the right course of study, start with philosophy rather than grammar and geometry “right from their swaddling-clothes, so to speak.” Twice elsewhere (Embassy to Caius 115 and I 70) he uses it of being trained in Jewish teaching “from swaddling-clothes.” In addition to the image of “swaddling-clothes,” in the passage cited by the critics (On Drunkenness 198) we find also the idea of “learn from childhood” and the image of the “battered” spirit, all of which appear conjoined in the philosopher (44.3). So too, both Philo and the philosopher begin by saying “I do not wonder” and “I wonder.”
2. In the essay Every Good Man is Free (17), Philo argues that political freedom is not a fit subject for an inquiry, only the topic of the “slavery of the soul to emotion.” The philosopher in Longinus is said to inquire and to suspect the theory of political freedom as an explanation of great rhetoric.
3. Philo (Every Good Man is Free 48) speaks of the fact that slaves have no freedom of speech, and he quotes in support the same line used later by Marcus Aurelius (II .80): “You were born a slave, and you have no part in free speech.” The philosopher makes the same point, quoting Homer.
4. The images of slaves, bonds, and bondage are frequent in Philo (On Drunkenness 101; Every Good Man is Free 18); the image and the word appear in the philosopher’s speech (44.5). We should consider also that other parts of Philo correspond to Longinus’s rebuttal of the philosopher and to other parts of On the Sublime.
5. In fragment 2.8 of On Providence, Philo speaks of “souls without ballast”; Longinus uses the same image, and word, in 2.2.
6. Philo, in Every Good Man is Free (24), says that he who has a “low sensibility, one appropriate to a slave,” is being really a slave; Longinus (9.3) speaks of the man whose “sensibility is appropriate to a slave” and of “low sensibility.”
7. Philo, though a confirmed Jew and a commentator on books of the Bible, speaks of Moses as “the law-giver of the Jews” (see Every Good Man is Free 29.43); Longinus uses a comparable phrase in 9.9.
8. Philo, in The Eternity of the World, rejects the Stoic notion of decay, destruction, and rebirth (47 ff.)—a doctrine which would be anathema to Longinus-and denies that the world has become “old and sterile” (61), asserting that it “over and over again remains the same, being always young.” Longinus’ aesthetic theory would not allow him to admit a decay in nature’s powers; if Longinus was a Hellenized Jew, the philosophic, and theological, source of his view could well be Philo or Philo’s own source, the Bible.
9. In The Unchangeableness of God, Philo speaks of the Hebrew soul as “having the custom of conversing with sublime powers, sensing as below itself everything that has to do with the body, since such things are low and earthly.” In 7.1, Longinus emphasizes that greatness of soul “senses as below itself” such worldly things as honor, riches, etc.
10. Philo, in On Drunkenness (8), follows Plato, as does Longinus, by arguing that virtues and vices arise from the same source (see Longin us 5.1). So, too, Philo’s image for this—”shoots springing up from one root”— derives from Plato, as does Longinus’ argument in ch. 44, describing how vices hatch in our souls (see ch. 44, n. on according to the wise).
11. Philo has an extended image for “the huge army of the world’s desires” (On Drunkenness 75), and refers to esteem, empire, beauty, strength, and other graspings; so too Longinus in 44.6 ff.
12. Philo, in the essay Every Good Man is Free (18), says that he is concerned with those who are not yoked to craving, fright, pleasure, and pain, that is, with those who have thrown off their chains, “just as those who have escaped from confinement”; the image turns up in Longin us in 44.10.
13. Philo, in several places, is fond of the image of the sea ebbing back into itself (On the Eternity of the World 142; The Unchangeableness of God 177). The same image appears in Longin us’ famous description of the aged Homer (9.13).

Since Philo visited Rome about 40 A.D., and since it seems probable that Longinus was employed in a Roman household as a kind of tutor, some have assumed that they met and conversed. Without admitting or denying the possibility, it is possible to see, on the basis of the foregoing parallels, an influence. Philo changed from an early Stoic period (Every Good Man is Free) to a more orthodox—even if highly allegorical—Hebraism; if, as we, and others, suspect, Longinus was a Hellenized Jew, he would probably have read Philo. Out of that writer’s manifold writings, it would be easy for Longinus to have extracted, whether deliberately or by the “hooks and eyes” of memory the various uses to which he put Philo’s not always consistent positions.

As for the notion that Philo wrote On the Sublime, it may be disregarded. For example, Philo is extremely fond of Hebraic metaphors—e.g., “the city of the body” (On Drunkenness 101), a form of image which does not tum up in Longinus. In addition to such minor details we may point to the general cast of Philo’s style, which is closer, in its discursiveness, to Plutarch than to Longinus, and to Philo’s general contempt for rhetoric.