Aristobulus, dramatic authors like Ezekiel the tragedian, and poets like the authors of the Jewish Sibylline Oracles.
Philo unites the different aspects of this Alexandrian Judaism within himself: Hellenistic culture, loyalty to Rome, Jewish faith. He belonged to the moneyed high bourgeoisie. We know two of his brothers. The first, perhaps the elder, was an important figure mentioned by Josephus. He was named Caius Julius Alexander. The first two names are characteristic of his Roman citizenship. His birth must be placed around 13 B.C.1 He was the Alabarch of Alexandria, that is, the person charged by the Roman government with collecting taxes. The protégé of Claudius’s mother Antonia, he had ties of friendship with Claudius (Josephus, Antiquities, XIX, 5, 1) of whom he was an almost exact contemporary.
His fortune was enormous. Josephus tells us that he furnished the gold and silver to cover the doors of the new Temple of Jerusalem started by Herod the Great, but unfinished at the time of Christ’s death, since the apostles speak of its construction in progress. In 35, when Herod Agrippa I grew bored of life with his uncle Antipas at Tiberiades and needed money to lead a sumptuous existence at Rome, he went to Alexandria to seek out Alexander and borrow a large sum from him. This supposes relations between the Herod family and that of Philo about which we will speak again.
Alexander the Alabarch had two sons, Tiberius Julius Alexander, the elder, is well known.2 He abandoned the Jewish religion, entered Roman service in 40, and was epistrategus of Syria in 41 and procurator of Judea in 45. Prefect of Egypt under Nero, he repressed a Jewish uprising at Alexandria. He contributed to Vespasian’s coming to power. He was second in command of the Roman army during the siege of Jerusalem in 70. Philo mentions him in one of his works, De Animalibus. Tiberius Julius was then a cultured young man who had already carried out a mission in Rome. The episode must be situated around 39 before his entrance into Roman service. He must have been about 25. Thus he was born around A.D. 14.
The Alabarch had a second son, Marcus Julius Alexander, undoubtedly born in A.D. 16. He died young in 44. A. Fuks connects him, rightly it seems, with a major Alexandrian exporter of the same name.3 But Josephus has bequeathed us the most astonishing facet of his biography. He obtained the hand of the Herodian Berenice, daughter of Herod Agrippa I, his father’s friend, no doubt thanks to the Emperor Claudius’s support. Once more we observe the ties between the families of Philo and of the Herods. As we will explain later on, the episode takes place at Rome in 41, precisely at a time when Philo was there.
Besides the Alabarch, Philo had a younger brother, Lysimachus. He appears in De Animalibus, which is a dialogue between two brothers. Schwartz places his birth around 10 B.C.4 He has often been confused with the Alabarch, as a result of errors in the manuscripts of Josephus. He surely must be identified with one Julius Lysimachus who belonged to the council of the Prefect of Alexandria, Caecina Tuscus. Philo’s dialogue informs us that he had a daughter who was betrothed to her cousin Tiberius Julius Alexander.
The most interesting point is certainly the connection of Philo’s family with the Herod family. The former represented major international Jewish banking, the latter an equally cosmopolitan Jewish aristocracy. The elder Herod, founder of the dynasty, was the kind of oriental kinglet who used to pass part of his life in Rome and there spend his fabulous wealth. One thinks of an Aga Khan. He was connected to Agrippa, Augustus’s son-in-law. We will have to speak here especially about his grandson, Herod Agrippa I, and the latter’s daughter, the famous Berenice.
For the moment, we only note that the close ties that we observe between the Herods and Philo’s family suggest that the two families were related. J. Schwartz assumes this. The connection could only have been through the Hasmoneans, among whom Herod the Great’s wife Mariamne was numbered. The link would confirm St. Jerome’s report connecting Philo to a priestly line. From that it would follow that the family was Palestinian and that only Philo’s father had settled at Alexandria. Support for this is found in the fact, emphasized by Schwartz, of the family’s Roman citizenship.5 This citizenship was impossible for Alexandrian Jews. That implies that Philo’s father possessed citizenship before his arrival in the city.
All this data lets us delineate Philo’s social and chronological situation with considerable certainty. His birth is often placed around 20 B.C. What we have said allows Schwartz to put it at a latter date.6 If Alexander the Alabarch was born between 15 and 13, Philo, who came immediately before or after him must have been born around then. Philo seems rather to be the second son. Thus, we can fix his birth around 13 B.C.
Family circumstances might have steered Philo toward business. The highest aspirations were possible for him. From his family’s elevated position, he gets a sense of political responsibility. But only at the end of his life do we see him play a role in this order and come into contact with government circles. His interests were directed elsewhere, and primarily toward the philosophical life. His family’s position allowed him to get a full education. Frequent allusions in his writings to academic culture, as it was then organized in Alexandria, show that he had passed through all its levels.
He could have been a brilliant rhetorician, the profession at which contemporary culture aimed. But his ideal lay elsewhere. He tells us that very young “he began to feel the sting of philosophy” (De Congressu, 17).7 He first cultivates grammar, the servant of philosophy, only to prepare himself. Philo identifies with the second of the two great models offered by his contemporary culture, the rhetorician and the philosopher. For him and his contemporaries, philosophy is a conversion. It involves an ascetical effort of detachment that leads to discovering the true meaning of life in the possession of inner goods.
Philo’s own testimony confirms that he lead a “philosophical” life.
There was a time when I had leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the universe and its contents, when I made its spirit my own in all its beauty and loveliness and true blessedness, when my constant companions were divine themes and verities, wherein I rejoiced with a joy that never cloyed or sated. I had no base or abject thoughts nor groveled in search of reputation or wealth or bodily comforts, but always seemed to be borne aloft into the heights with a soul possessed by some God-sent inspiration [ἐπιθειασμός], a fellow-traveler with the sun and moon and the whole heaven and universe. Ah then I gazed down from the upper air, and straining the mind’s eye beheld, as from some commanding peak, the multitudinous world-wide spectacle of earthly things, and blessed my lot in that I had escaped by main force from the plagues of mortal life (De Specialibus Legibus III, 1–2).8
This text might have been written by a Platonist of the time, Plutarch for example. It is completely full of Platonic echoes. The divine inspiration, ἐπιθειασμός, recalls the teaching of the Ion. The ascension to the heights and participation in the circular movement of the spheres recalls the Phaedrus. The observatory, σκοπία, from which one surveys the earthly realm comes from the Republic (445 C). All these expressions are found again later in Plotinus, whose resemblances to Philo are striking and still later in the Christian Gregory of Nyssa.
Ιn Philo, as in Gregory, we must not stop at the similarities of expression. Philo gets his way of speaking from Plato. But what he puts beneath the words is different. For, Philo’s God is the God of Abraham. His mysticism is the outgrowth of Jewish piety. Philo finds the source of his mysticism not only in the Greek sages he reads, but even more in his people’s religious tradition. Evidently the Bible itself is this source by which he is primarily nourished. But were there spiritual teachers in contemporary Judaism who guided
