De Virtutibus

Philo Judaeus

The works of Philo Judaeus, the contemporary of Josephus, volume 3. Yonge, C. D., translator. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.

And the truth of this assertion of mine is easy to be seen from other circumstances also. What good could it ever be to any man that his ancestors had been endowed with ever such great acuteness of vision if he himself were deprived of his eyes? How could that fact assist him to see? Or again, supposing a person to have an impediment in his speech, how would his utterance be assisted

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by the fact that his parents or his grandfathers had had fine voices? And how will a man who has been emaciated and exhausted by a long and wasting disease, be assisted to recover his former strength, if the original founders of his race are, on account of their strength as athletes, enrolled among the Olympic conquerors, or the victors at any other periodical games? For their bodily infirmities will equally remain in the same condition as before, not receiving any amelioration from the successes of their relations.

In the same manner, just parents are of no advantage to unjust men, nor temperate parents to intemperate children, nor, in short, are ancestors of any kind of excellence of any advantage to wicked descendants; for even the laws themselves are of no advantage to those who transgress them, as they are meant to punish them, and what is it that we ought to look upon as unwritten laws, except the lives of those persons who have imitated virtue?

On which account, I imagine, that nobility herself, if God were to invest her with the form and organs of a man, would stand before those obstinate and unworthy descendants and speak thus: "Relationship is not measured by blood alone, where truth is the judge, but by a similarity of actions, and by a careful imitation of the conduct of your ancestors. But you have pursued an opposite line of conduct, thinking hateful such actions as are dear to me, and loving such deeds as are hateful to me; for in my eyes modesty, and truth, and moderation, and a due government of the passions, and simplicity, and innocence, are honourable, but in your opinion they are dishonourable; and to me all shameless behaviour is hateful, and all falsehood, and all immoderate indulgence of the passions, and all pride, and all wickedness. But you look upon these things as near and dear to you.

Why, then, do you, when by your actions you show all possible eagerness to alienate yourselves from them, sheltering yourselves under a plausible name, hypocritically pretend in words to a relationship? For I cannot endure seductive insinuations falsely put on, or any deceit; because it is easy for any persons to find out specious arguments, but it is not easy to change an evil disposition into a good one.

"And I, looking therefore at these facts, both now consider and shall always think those persons who have kindled sparks of enmity my enemies, and I shall look upon them with more suspicion than upon those who have been reproached openly

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for want of nobility; for they, indeed, have this to allege in their defence, that they have no connection at all with excellence. But you are justly liable to punishment who act thus after having been born of noble houses, and being fond of making your boast of your noble descent, and of looking upon it as your glory; for, though archetypal models of virtue have been established in close connection with, and in a manner implanted in you, you have determined to give no good impression of them yourselves.

But that nobility is placed only in the acquisition of virtue, and that you ought to imagine that he who has that is the only man really noble, and not the man who is born of noble and virtuous parents, is plain from many circumstances."

Again, who is there who would deny that those men who were born of him who was made out of the earth were noble themselves, and the founders of noble families? persons who have received a birth more excellent than that of any succeeding generation, in being sprung from the first wedded pair, from the first man and woman, who then for the first time came together for the propagation of offspring resembling themselves. But, nevertheless, when there were two persons so born, the elder of them endured to slay the younger; [*]( Genesis iv. 1. ) and, having committed the great and most accursed crime of fratricide, he first defiled the ground with human blood.