Philo of Alexandria - Books and Journals

202 part two
of Philonic thought from differing points of view. The subjects discussed range
from the conceptions of humanity and political power to the interrelationships
between Philonic thought and Platonic and Stoic philosophy. For individual
contributions see the summaries under the names of Calabi, Graffigna, Mazzanti
and Radice. (RR)
20219. F. Calabi, ‘Sovranità divina, regalità umana in Filone di Alessandria,’
in P. Bettiolo and G. Filoramo (edd.), Il dio mortale: Teologie
politiche tra antico e contemporaneo (Brescia 2002) 63–77.
Philo is rather indifferent as to what may be the best type of government.
What interests him is to assert and demonstrate the legitimacy of the Law of
Moses. Prototype and model of the true king is Moses, the lawgiver. In first
century Alexandria the Mosaic Law needed to be defended: Philo underlines its
eternity, necessity and truth in respect of other laws. The Law is one and contains
all there is to know about the relationships between God, cosmos and man and
about the relationships between men. Human kingdoms and governments come
and go, what counts is concordance with the will and the Law of God. (HMK)
20220. C.Carlier,LaCité de Moïse: la représentation du peuple juif
chez Philon d’Alexandrie (diss. Sorbonne, Paris IV 2002).
This doctoral dissertation was prepared under the supervision of Prof. Monique
Alexandre and defended in June 2002. The basis of the study is a philological
investigation of the terms used to describe the city as a community of persons
(πλίτης, πλιτεω–πλιτεμαι, πλίτευμα, πλιτεία—πλις had been covered
in an earlier unpublished study). On this basis conclusions are reached on
how Philo as a Hellenized Jew conceives the community of the Jewish people
in terms of the Hellenistic conception of the city. The dissertation consists of
five chapters. The first examines the use of πλίτης and πλιτεία in relation to
the Jews in non-Jewish authors such as Hecataeus, Manetho, Nicholas of Damascus
and Strabo. In the second chapter Carlier examines various Hellenistic-
Jewish writers before Philo and their use of the vocabulary of the city. In the
last three chapters attention is fixed on Philo himself. Chapter three examines
Philo’s use of institutional terminology when describing the city of Moses and
the members of its community. Chapter four examines the conceptual terminology
used to depict the relations between the members of the city of Moses,
notably ιλία, κινωνία, σνμία. The fifth chapter turns to the philosophical
use of the vocabulary of the city, examining the link between city and cosmology,
the concept of the κσμπλίτης, the connection between citizenship and
virtue and the concept of God as only citizen. In an appendix a commentary
is given on Legat. 281–282 which describes Jerusalem as ερπλις. Themain
conclusion of the study is that Philo’s conception of the Mosaic polity shows
a community of Jews and proselytes held together by a common devotion to
the laws of Moses, a community without a territory, but with the created reality
of the cosmos as its spiritual home. In this conception Philo is influenced by