ing the statue of the emperor, and to argue that
they had no right to the same privileges of citizenship with those who
boasted of their Macedonian blood. But, as the Jews did not deny the
charge that was brought against them, Caligula would hear nothing that
they had to say; and Philo withdrew with the remark, "Though the emperor
is against us, God will be our friend."

We learn the sad tale of the Jews' suffering under Caligula from the
pages of their own historian only. But though Philo may have felt and
written as one of the sufferers, his truth is undoubted. He was a man
of unblemished character, and the writer of greatest learning and of the
greatest note at that time in Alexandria; being also of a great age, he
well deserved the honour of being sent on the embassy to Caligula. He
was in religion a Jew, in his philosophy a platonist, and by birth an
Egyptian: and in his numerous writings we may trace the three sources
from which he drew his opinions. He is always devotional and in earnest,
full of pure and lofty thoughts, and often eloquent. His fondness for
the mystical properties of numbers, and for finding an allegory or
secondary meaning in the plainest narrative, seems borrowed from the
Egyptians. According to the Eastern proverb every word in a wise book
has seventy-two meanings; and this mode of interpretation was called
into use by the necessity which the Jews felt of making the Old
Testament speak a meaning more agreeable to their modern views of
religion. In Philo's speculative theology he seems to have borrowed less
from Moses than from the abstractions of Plato, whose shadowy hints he
has embodied in a more solid form. He was the first Jewish writer
that applied to the Deity the mystical notion of the Egyptians, that
everything perfect was of three parts. Philo's writings are valuable as
showing the steps by which the philosophy of Greece may be traced
from the writings of Plato to those of Justin Martyr and Clemens
Alexandrinus. They give us the earliest example of how the mystical
interpretation of the Scriptures was formed into a system, by which
every text was made to unfold some important philosophic or religious
truth to the learned student, at the same time that to the unlearned
reader it conveyed only the simple historic fact.

The Hellenistic Jews, while suffering under severe political
disabilities, had taken up a high literary position in Alexandria, and
had forced their opinions into the n