The Essential Philo (Philo Judaeus)

By Philo of Alexandria

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805202773
• ISBN13: 9780805202779
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Schocken Books
• Length: 372 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good Primary Source Introduction

It would appear that there are two types of introductions to Philo that are sometimes hard to distinguish between when comparing titles online: introductions which are scholarly secondary sources offering little of the source texts beyond quotations, and those which are curated or select writings from the man himself. This title is of the latter sort, and is a comparatively brief selection of Philo's more famous treatises such as 'On the Creation of the World', 'The First Book on the Allegories of the Sacred Laws', 'On the Life of Moses', and 'On a Contemplative Life', with a few others as well. It is like the equivalent to a book sporting selected dialogues of Plato (such as the 'Five Dialogues' of Hackett with ~170 pages): it gets the basic point across without subjecting the unprepared reader to all of the works in the full corpus (36 dialogues and ~1800 pages in Plato's case, with the complete Hackett edition). The translation used here is that of the 19th century author C.D. Yonge, and in some places has the needlessly flowery prose typical of Victorian language, where a sentence or paragraph is so verbose that the meaning which it attempts to convey becomes paradoxically cryptic and obscure despite its overflow of words. However, on the whole, this is a good title for someone who wants a primary source on Philo without necessarily committing to reading his entire extended works.