r
its moulding influences, Essenism represented the spirit of the age,
and it spread far and wide. At Alexandria, above all places, where the
life of luxury and dissoluteness repelled the serious, ascetic ideas
took firm hold of the people, and the Therapeutic life, _i.e._, the
life of prayer and labor devoted to God, which corresponded to the
system of the Essenes, had numerous votaries. The first century
witnessed the extremes of the religious and irreligious sentiments.
The world was weary and jaded; it had lost confidence in human reason
and faith in social ideals, and while the materialists abandoned
themselves to hideous orgies and sensual debaucheries, the
higher-minded went to the opposite excess and sought by flight from
the world and mortification of the flesh to attain to supernatural
states of ecstasy. A book has come down to us under the name of
Philo[60] which describes "the contemplative life" of a Jewish
brotherhood 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 vir