that lived apart on the shores of Lake Mareotis by the mouth of the Nile.  Men and women lived in the settlement, though all intercourse between the sexes was rigidly avoided.  During six days of the week they met in prayer, morning and evening, and in the interval devoted themselves in solitude to the practice of virtue and the study of the holy allegories, and the composition of hymns and psalms.  On the Sabbath they sat in common assembly, but with the women separated from the men, and listened to the allegorical homily of an elder; they paid special honor to the Feast of Pentecost, reverencing the mystical attributes of the number fifty, and they celebrated a religious banquet thereon.  During the rest of the year they only partook of the sustenance necessary for life, and thus in their daily conduct realized the way which the rabbis set out as becoming for the study of the Torah:  “A morsel of bread with salt thou must eat, and water by measure thou must drink; thou must sleep upon the ground and live a life of hardship, the while thou toilest in the Torah."[61]

We do not know whether Philo attached himself to one of these brotherhoods of organized solitude, or whether he lived even more strictly the solitary life out in the wilderness by himself.  Certainly he was at one period in sympathy with ascetic ideas.  It seemed to him that as God was alone, so man must be alone in order to be like God.[62] In his earlier writings he is constantly praising the ascetic life, as a means, indeed, to virtue rather than as a good in itself, and as a helpful discipline to the man of incomplete moral strength, though inferior to the spontaneous goodness which God vouchsafes to the righteous.  Isaac is the type of this highest bliss, while the life of Jacob is the type of the progress to virtue through asceticism.[63] The flight from Laban represents the abandonment of family and social life for the practical service of God, and as Jacob, the ascetic, became Israel, “the man who beholdeth God,” so Philo determined “to scorn delights and live laborious days” in order to be drawn nearer to the true Being.  But he seems to have been disappointed in his hopes, and to have discovered that the attempt to cut out the natural desires of man was not the true road to righteousness.  “I often,” he says,[64] “left my kindred and friends and fatherland, and went into a solitary place, in order that I might have knowledge of things worthy of contemplation, but I profited nothing:  for my mind was sore tempted by desire and turned to opposite things.  But now, sometimes even when I am in a multitude of men, my mind is tranquil, and God scatters aside all unworthy desires, teaching me that it is not differences of place which affect the welfare of the soul, but God alone, who knows and directs its activity howsoever he pleases.”