On a section of his intellectual biography of Philo of Alexandria, entitled “Philo’s Role as Pious and Suffering Ambassador,” Maren R. Niehoff wrote:
Philo as a narrator builds his leading role in the Jewish embassy by pointing to his experience and intellectual superiority. His exemplary maturity shows in the first meeting with Gaius, who greeted them in a friendly manner and conveyed the message that he himself would hear the case in due course. While the other ambassadors rejoice at the emperor’s positive response, Philo remains sceptical and is troubled by the following thoughts:
But as I believe to have a greater amount of good sense on account of my age and my good education, I was alarmed by the things that gave joy to them. Bestirring my own thinking power (logismos), I said: Why, when so many envoys have arrived from almost the whole earth, did he say that he would hear only us? What does he want? He cannot have remained ignorant of the act that we are Jews , for whom it would be a pleasure not to be disadvantaged . . . Thus thinking I was deeply disturbed and had no rest by day or night. Yet fainthearted I kept my sorrow secret, since it was not safe to express it, while another very heavy calamity suddenly and unexpectedly fell upon us—a calamity that brought danger not only to one part of the Jewish citizen-body, but collectively to the whole people. (Legat. 183-84) (Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography [The Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018], 34)
Commenting on this section from Philo’s Legatio ad Gaium (“On the Embassy to Gaius”), Niehoff writes:
This is one of the more personal passages in Philo’s entire oeuvre, when he shares with his readers the thoughts going through his mind. Stressing his own doubts regarding Gaius’s sincerity, Philo connects this scene from the initial stage of the embassy with the subsequent news about Gaius’s plan to erect his own statue in the Jerusalem Temple. Philo gives the impression that immediately after the meeting with Gaius, while he was still thinking about its meaning, the bad news about the Temple reached him. According to Philo’s own testimony, however, the Jewish ambassadors heard the news at a considerably later stage. In Embassy 185 he mentions the journeys they had in the meantime undertaken to follow Gaius, who was “spending some time round the bay [of Puteloli].” Philo thus had harmonized two events, namely, the initial meeting with Gaius in the early part of 39 CE and the subsequent announcement of his plans about the Jerusalem Temple which most probably dates to the summer of 40 CE. By fusing the two events Philo gives the impression that human diplomacy was doomed to failure from the beginning.
Philo explains his inner thoughts and shows how he relies on his education and logismos in order to judge external appearances more carefully than others. He prides himself in having the “good sense” to distrust Gaius rather than accept his gestures and benevolence. This disclosure of a personal reaction to an external stimulation reflects Stoic philosophy, which is concerned with the individual as embedded in society and reacting to the outside world. While Philo does not use distinctly Stoic terminology, except the rather general notion of logismos, his position is close to that of the Roman philosopher Seneca, who began to publish his first works at the time of Philo’s embassy. Seneca similarly treats the individual person with emphasis on his or her reaction to the outside world. Time and again he describes how he reacted to specific situations and other people by applying his rational judgement.
. . .
On another occasion, [Seneca] says, “I reflected and recovered and regained my strength” through studies. Like Philo, Seneca engages in an inner dialogue, urging himself “not to be yielding up my soul.” Both Seneca and Philo have integrated personal experiences into their discussion and project a narrative self of Stoic complexion in order to demonstrate the concrete truth of their positions. Seneca discloses his self in order to show that “everything depends on opinion; . . . a man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is.” Philo tells his readers how he relies on his logismos in order to confront the impression of Gaius’s friendly gestures, suggesting that from the beginning, this Roman emperor is “our mortal enemy” (Philo, Legat. 180). (Ibid., 34-35, 36 emphasis added. Comment in square bracket added for clarification)
Why is this significant? The verb, transliterated here as logisomos is λογιζομαι, a verb that has been discussed a bit on this blog, including my 7-part series, Λογιζομαι in texts contemporary with the New Testament:
The overwhelming evidence from this passage in Philo, as well as (1) the rest of Philo’s works and (2) the other Greek literature contemporary with the New Testament is that λογιζομαι does not support the popular Reformed understanding of the verb, namely, that it means imputation (seeing in someone something that is not really there but must be imputed to them from an alien [external] source); instead, the verb refers to what someone is thinking of as a mental representation of the reality they are witnessing. That Philo, through his logismos, is able to know the true, intrinsic nature of Gaius, not his mere (deceptive) external presentation of himself.
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