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WHY DOES PHILO CRITICIZE THE STOIC IDEAL OF APATHEIA IN ON ABRAHAM 257? PHILO AND CONSOLATORY LITERATURE1

Some of Philo’s philosophical inconsistencies are not always the result of a supposed eclectic mind, or of the subordination of the philosophical material to the necessities of exegesis, but can also be explained in light of Philo’s adherence to cultural conventions of his time and milieu. This is the case with the curious advocacy of metriopatheia (moderation of the passions) and the implied criticism of apatheia (absence of passions) in Philo’s exegesis of Abraham’s attitude upon the death of Sarah. I state that from paragraph 245 to 261 of his On Abraham, Philo adopts the popular literary genre of consolation, and that it is the close adhesion to the rules of this genre that explains Philo’s odd preference for the virtue of metriopatheia over that of apatheia. First, the literary analysis of the passage discloses the fact that Philo is shaping a consolatory discourse built in two parts: 1) the eulogy to the dead Sarah followed by 2) the arguments of consolation. In both of these parts, Philo is inscribing himself within a long Greco-Roman tradition of consolatory discourses. The comparison with other consolatory pieces shows that the adoption of the ideal of metriopatheia is in fact a permanent trait of the genre. What is more, the literary analysis sheds light on another aspect of Philo’s endeavour: the shaping of Abraham as a new hero of consolation and the modelling of the patriarch of the Hebrew nation in a way that fully corresponds to the norms and expectations of Greco-Roman culture. At the end of his On Abraham, Philo recounts the attitude of Abraham at the death of his beloved wife, Sarah. According to Philo, the patriarch did not display an absence of passions or emotions (apatheia), but rather a moderation of the passions (metriopatheia):