The Studia Philonica Annual 14 (2002) 31-47

P H I L O , P E R S O N I F I C A T I O N , A N D T H E

T R A N S F O R M A T I O N O F G R A M M A T I C A L G E N D E R 1

L E S L I E B A Y N E S

That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,

Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.

T. S. Eliot, 'East Coker' II

One of Philo's most striking manipulations of grammatical gender appears in Fug. 51-52. The touchstone for his discussion is Isaac's charge to Jacob in Gen 28:1-2 LXX:

Get up, flee to Mesopotamia, to the house of Bathouel, your mother's father; and take as a wife from there one of the daughters of Laban, your mother's brother.2

Philo comments that Bathouel means 'daughter of God,' and the daughter of God is Wisdom.3 But, he questions, how could this Bathouel, this necessarily female daughter of God, be Rebecca's father? His answer expli­citly articulates the conjunction of personification,4 grammar, and gender

1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Philo Group of the Society of Biblical Literature in November 2001. I would like to thank Thomas Tobin, Annewies van den Hoek, Gregory E. Sterling, and the other members of the Philo Group for their helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Fug. 48. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3 Fug. 50. Immediately following this, Philo notes that Bathouel, the 'daughter of God' is dei7tdp6evoc,, ever-virgin. While it is certainly common for Philo to call the feminine personifications Wisdom or Virtue 'virgins' (Praem. 53; Cher. 50; Q.E. 2.3), in this instance the correspondence between Bathouel and the Hebrew Pl^im, 'one kept in her father's home as a virgin,' is unmistakable. For more on Philo's understandings of etymo­logy, see Lester Grabbe, Etymology in Early Jewish Interpretation (Atlanta 1988). * Personification, or Tipooomojtoua, often plays an important role in allegory. The earli­est known text that combines both literary forms, thus a 'personification allegory,' is the Heracles story of Prodicus, which Philo adapts in Sacr. 20-34. Perhaps the earliest systematic discussion of rcpoocoTtoTtoua occurs in Demetrius of Phalerum's De Elocutione 265, variously dated from the third to the first centuries B.C.E. He writes: 'Another figure of thought — the so-called 'prosopopoeia' — may be employed to produce energy of style, as in the words: 'Imagine that your ancestors, or Hellas, or your native land, assuming a woman's form, should address such and such reproaches to you" (W. Rhys Roberts, ed., Demetrius on Style [New York 1902, 1979] 188-89). Not insignificant in

32 LESLIE BAYNES

transformation that this paper will address:

He called the father of Rebecca Bathouel. How may the daughter of God, Wisdom, rightly be called father? Is it because on the one hand the name wisdom is feminine (6vo|xa jiev 8fj/lt) aofyiaq ecrciv), but on the other its nature is masculine (dppev 5e f| <|)i>aic,)? For all virtues have designations (jtpoapiiaeic,) of women, but they have the powers and acts of the most perfect men. Since the entity that comes after God — even if it is the eldest of all other things — holds second place, it is called female in comparison to the male, the one who made everything, on the basis of its likeness to other things. For the female5 lacks and needs the male, which has priority. Paying no attention therefore to the discrepancies in the names (ovonaci 5iai|>opac,), let us say that the daughter of God, Wisdom, is both masculine and father, sowing and begetting in souls desire for learning, discipline, knowledge, good sense, and good and praiseworthy actions. It is from here that Jacob the Practicer woos for himself a bride.6

The noun o"0(|)ia, like most Greek abstract nouns, is grammatically feminine. Moreover, in Philo's thought it is feminine because of its secondary posi­tion in relation to God. But in its relationship to humanity, and specifically to the souls of humanity, wisdom's nature in its role as sower and begetter is manly. Thus its feminine 'name,' that is, its grammatical gender,7 and its 'true nature' conflict. How is Philo to resolve his cognitive dissonance at this point? In a decisive move, he determines to disregard the feminine grammatical gender of ao())ia. He urges the reader to pay no attention to

Demetrius' succinct definition is the mention of 'a woman's form.' While it is not true that 'all personification figures prior to the sixth century A.D. were exclusively and necessarily female' (James Paxson, The Poetics of Personification [Cambridge 1994] 6), nonetheless the vast majority of such figures were. Of all extant ancient authors, the rhetorician Quintilian devotes the most time to personification theory (Inst. or. 9.29-30; 11.41). The latter reference of Quintilian is the most intriguing for our purposes: 'Imper­sonation [prosopopoeia] demands even greater variety, since it involves the portrayal of children, women, nations, and even of voiceless things, all of which require to be repre­sented in character.' As Paxson wonders, 'If women and children are already persons, why must they be given speech according to the same fictional and figural mechanism that governs the 'impersonation,' or personification, of a nation or of inanimate and voiceless objects?' (Paxson, op. cit., 19). See also Karl Reinhardt, 'Personifikation und Allegorie,' Vermachtnis der Antike: Gesammelte Essays zur Philosophic und Geschichts-schreibung, ed. Carl Becker, 2nd ed. (Gottingen 1989) 7-23; Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York 1985). 5 The expression here is TO Qr\Xv, which is neuter. Perhaps this is because Philo is referring to a feminine thing or entity, the neuter 'entity that comes after God,' TO HETCI TOV 9eov, in this passage. Philo makes even God himself neuter in this context (the one who made everything, TO Td 6Xa rcoiow). Thanks to Annewies van den Hoek for bringing this point to my attention. 6 Fug. 51-52. 7 The word yevoc, signifying grammatical gender appears as early as Aristotle Rhet. 3.5.5 (1407 b): npcoTayopac, TO yevr| T<BV ovojrdTcov Sifipei, dppeva KCTI 9ii .ea Kai aiceuri. Philo, however, seems not to have employed ycvoq in this way.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 33

the discrepancies in the names (|rn8ev xfjc, ev xoiq ovouacn 8ia<j)opdcJ

((ipovTicTavtei;) but to call the daughter of God, that is, Wisdom, masculine and father.

But is a word 's grammatical gender so important that it merits such scrutiny? Philo's remarks imply that he, at least, believed that it was. Is his belief unique in the ancient world? Dorothy Sly believes that it is, writing that 'Philo sees significance in the gender of Greek words. I can find no precedent for this particular view. Among the Greeks, gender in language appears to have been accepted without question or comment.'8 But her remarks are not accurate. Contrary to Sly's understanding, Philo is not the only author in the ancient world to question or comment upon the signi­ficance of grammatical gender. Among the Greeks, Protagoras as recorded by Aristotle, Aristophanes through the characters of Socrates and Strepsia-des, and the Pyrrhonist Sceptic Sextus Empiricus address the intersection and perceived conflict of gender, grammatical and natural.9 One of the techniques they use in their discussions is humor, which Aristotle wields with subtlety, Aristophanes with his usual panache, and Sextus Empiricus with sustained invective.

Philo, however, treats grammatical gender with characteristic gravity, but at the same time he juggles it audaciously. In so doing, his linguistic legerdemain serves with few exceptions to elevate the male and to denigrate the female. This is no surprise. Philo's views of male and female are well-known;10 they may be conveniently summarized in the statement quoted above in Fug. 51: 'For the female lacks and needs the male, which has priority.' This assertion about female and male pervades the Philonic corpus. As Sharon Mattila asserts, 'Philo's gender categories are among the most rigid and consistently applied principles of his thought.'11

8 Dorothy Sly, Philo's Perception of Women, Brown Judaic Studies 209 (Atlanta 1990) 44. 9 According to ancient testimony the Stoic Chrysippus, too, addressed anomalies in language: '...Chrysippus, a man of great acumen who left three books On Anomaly, and contended against Regularity ... For Chrysippus, when he writes about the Inconsistency of speech, has as his object the showing that like things are denoted by unlike words and that unlike things are denoted by like words, as it is true ...' (Varro, De lingua latina 9.1, Loeb). See Michael Frede, 'Principles of Stoic Grammar,' The Stoics, ed. John Rist (Berke­ley 1978) 72; Max Pohlenz, Die Stoa (Gottingen 1959) 1.42; 2.25; Diogenes Laertius 7.192. 10 Standard treatments are Sly, op. cit. (n. 8), and Richard Baer, Philo's Use of the Categories Male and Female, Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums 3 (Leiden 1970). For a study of Philo's categories of gender applied specifically to Genesis 1-3, see Annewies van den Hoek, 'Endowed with Reason or Glued to the Senses: Philo's Thoughts on Adam and Eve,' The Creation of Man and Woman: Interpretations of Biblical Narratives in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, Themes in Biblical Narrative: Jewish and Christian Traditions 3 (Leiden 2000) 63-75. 11 Sharon Lea Mattila, 'Wisdom, Sense Perception, Nature, and Philo's Gender Gradient,' HTR 89 (1996) 103.

34 LESLIE BAYNES

This paper will explore two main issues: 1) ancient treatments of gram­matical gender, especially in their concerns with the conflict between 'nature' (0-ueuc,) and 'convention' (vouoc;/Gecuc,); and 2) Philo's transforma­tion of grammatical gender both within and outside the context of personification, particularly in its relation to Stoic linguistic theory.

Ancient Treatments of Grammatical Gender

The origin of grammatical gender is unknown, and theories that have attempted to explain it are consistently unsatisfactory up to and including current scholarship on the problem.12 In the 19th century, many scholars subscribed to the theory of grammatical gender proposed by Jakob Grimm, who believed that 'things named by masculine nouns were earlier, larger, firmer, quicker, more inflexible, active, moveable, creative; those which were feminine were later, smaller, softer, quieter, suffering/passive, receptive.'13 Grimm's characterization of the concepts male and female is essentially identical with Philo's.

Another theory popular in the late 19th century was that grammatical gender emerged following the imaginative creation of personified objects and concepts. Proponents of this view based their arguments on the pre­sence of personified inanimates in Indo-European mythology and poetry. But Karl Brugmann's refutation of this chronology reflects the opinion of a majority of linguists today:

12 Suzanne Romaine summarizes Istvan Fodor, whose theories on the origin of gramma­tical gender remain influential today: '... the modern European languages have inherited this system from a pattern of noun classification arising in Proto-Indo-European which originally grouped nouns according to phonological principles. It then developed into a grammatical system of syntactic concord or agreement. Despite popular opinion to the contrary, its main purpose is not to classify things according to their sex, but to provide a grammatical system linking nouns with the words which modified them. Over time, however, these noun classes acquired a certain amount of semantic motivation by asso­ciation with certain prominent nouns belonging to them. Thus, classes with a large number of nouns referring to female animates became associated with the female sex, while those containing a large number of nouns referring to male animates were associated with the male sex.' See Romaine, 'Gender, Grammar, and the Space in Between,' Commu­nicating Gender in Context, eds. Helga Kotthoff and Ruth Wodak, Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 42 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1997) 54, and Istvan Fodor, 'The Origin of Grammatical Gender' Lingua 8 (1959) 1-41, 186-214. Scholarly work on the implications of grammatical gender continues and has made good progress, especially in the areas of comparative linguistic studies and in feminist interpretations of the inter­relationships of grammatical and natural gender in modern languages. See Greville G. Corbett, Gender, Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics (Cambridge 1991). 13 Romaine, 'Gender, Grammar, and the Space in Between' 53.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 35

In all cases that come into consideration here the grammatical gender of the word, so far as we can judge[,] is the earlier ... it was the grammatical form of the noun that, through the psychological impulse of analogy ... decided the definite direction of the gender — whether it should be masculine or feminine.14

Ancient Greek writers who explored the issue of grammatical gender evince the same perplexity as modern scholars on the topic, but the ancients often express it through various forms of comic writing. Gender lends itself to comedy because it sets up reversals. This is manifested differently in each of the writers considered here: puzzlement that borders on quizzical humor in Aristotle, parody in the dramatist Aristophanes, and invective in Sextus Empiricus.15

But behind these writings lies the already long-standing philosophical debate of the conflict between ^uavi; and voiio-q or 6eaic,, ' na ture ' and 'convention' respectively. Widespread as a general philosophical topic, it was also the impetus of a lively discussion in the study of language.16 As applied to language, the most well-known ancient formulation of the nature/convention issue is Plato's Cratylus.17 The character Cratylus argues that the names of things are natural and not conventional, so that ' the person who knows names also knows the things named;'18 while Hermo-genes counters with the opinion that 'there is no name given to anything by nature (( IJOK;); all is by convention (v6u.oc,) and by habit (eBoq) of the users. '19 The dialogue does not mention grammatical gender, but the central question of the tyvoiq/Beaiq debate, whether names exist by nature or by convention, may be applied to it: does, or should, the grammatical gender of a name reflect the natural properties of the thing signified?

Protagoras, the earliest known Greek writer to comment upon gramma­tical gender, believed that it should. Our only access to his statements on the topic is through fragments in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Sophistical Refuta­tions. The first simply states that Protagoras separated the genders into three categories, masculine, feminine, and neuter.20 The second discusses gender in the context of solecism. After defining solecism as the use of an

14 Karl Brugmann, The Nature and Origin of Noun Genders in the Indo-European Languages, trans. E. Y. Robbins (New York 1897) 17, 20, as quoted by Muhammad Hasan Ibrahim, Grammatical Gender: Its Origin and Development (The Hague 1973) 93. 15 See William Flint Thrall and Addison Hibbard, A Handbook to Literature (New York 1936) 240-41 for the different categorizations of humor. 16 For a brief history, see R. H. Robins, Ancient and Mediaeval Grammatical Theory (London 1951) 7 ff. 17 While the Cratylus discusses the nature/convention debate, it does not apply it to grammatical gender. 18 Crat. 435. 19 Crat. 384. 20 Rhet. 3.5.5 (1407b).

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ungrammatical expression, Aristotle alludes to Protagoras on gender, using his examples of the nouns ufjvu; and RT|Xr£, both feminine.21 He writes:

What solecism is has already been stated. It is possible not to commit it, yet to seem to do so, as well as to commit it, yet seem not to do so. Suppose, as Protagoras used to say, that |ifjvic, (wrath) and Kifkrfc (helmet) are masculine. On the one hand, he who calls wrath a 'destructress' (o'lAonevri) commits a solecism, according to Protagoras, even though he does not appear to anyone else to do so. On the other hand, he who calls it a 'destructor' (ovXoiievoq) appears to commit a solecism but does not do so.22

The words \af\viq and jr.f|A,ricj are grammatically feminine. Protagoras, however, disagrees with the fact of their feminine grammatical gender and asserts that they should rather be grammatically masculine; 'presumably on the grounds of [their] semantic association with male characteristics and activities rather than with female.'23 As a result, Protagoras believes that anyone who personifies the concept of wrath should make it a male, a 'destructor, ' to cohere with its 'nature, ' rather than female, a 'destruct­ress,' to cohere with its grammatical gender. The fact that these comments appear in a discussion of solecism is significant, indicating that 'proper ' personification of the time followed grammatical, not perceived natural, gender. If a noun was feminine, it was personified as feminine. If it was masculine, it would theoretically be personified as a masculine figure.24 The reader derives the distinct impression that Aristotle judges the opinions of Protagoras as idiosyncratic, but he does not articulate this clearly; he simply quotes the sophist and moves on.

In his comedy Clouds, Aristophanes pokes fun at a person concerned with the peculiarities of grammatical gender, here Socrates, although his

21 These two words are taken from the Iliad 1.1-2. D. L. Blank (Sextus Empiricus: Against the Grammarians [Adversus mathematicos I] [Oxford/New York 1998] 175) writes, 'The first verse or verses of the Iliad were the standard example, used by grammarians ... whenever possible. The practice was so widespread that it was satirized in four epi­grams by Palladas: ' 'Destructive wrath' did I, poor devil, take for my wife I And my art too begins with 'wrath'. I Woe is me the much-wrathed one for my thrice-angering lot: I That of my art of grammar and my irascible wife' (AP 9.168); ' 'Wrath of Achilles' is also the cause of my I 'Destructive' poverty as a grammarian ...' (AP 9.169. 1-2); 'Beginning of grammar is the five-line curse: I The first has menin, the second 'destruc­tive', I ... I How can a grammarian after five curses I and five cases not have great sorrow?' (AP 9.173.1-2, 7-8); 'Here teach those hated by Sarapis, I Who begin with 'destructive wrath' ...' (AP 9.174. 1-2).' To these may be added three further examples from the Palatine Anthology: Lucilius 11.140, 279; Lucian 11.400. 22 Soph. ref. 14 (173b 19-174a 15). Robins op. cit. 22 sees significance in the fact that in the Soph. ref. Aristotle calls the neuter gender TO \i£,xaS,v, but in Rhet 3.5 he uses OKEUOI;. 23 R. H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics, Longman Linguistics Library, 3rd ed. (London 1990) 30. 24 See note 4 above and Dio Chrysostom's figure of personified Law, N6|xoc, (Dial. 1.75), later in this paper.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 37

real targets may be Prodicus and Protagoras.25 When Socrates, depicted in the comedy as the arch-sophist, asks his dialogue partner for a list of 'males among the quadrupeds, ' Strepsiades mentions dX.eKxp\)c6v, a word that generally designates both a male and a female chicken. Socrates, not com­menting on the fact that Strepsiades has listed 'chicken' under the category of quadrupeds, focuses instead upon the intricacies of grammatical gender and insists upon a feminine form, hen (d^eKxpucnva),26 to supplement the masculine dA-EKpruoW.27 From here the conversation becomes progressively more ridiculous and confusing to Strepsiades. Socrates points out that rj Kdp8a7ioq, trough (or mortar), is grammatically feminine even though it has a masculine ending, just like the name Cleonymos has a masculine ending. Strepsiades' concrete mind cannot grasp this distinction, and he responds, 'so [I should say] 'troughess' and 'Miss Cleonymos' (KapSorcri, KAecovuuri)'. Socrates then asks Strepsiades for a list of men's names:

Strep: Philoxenos, Melesias, Amynias. Soc: No, lout, these aren't male. Strep: They're not? Soc: Not at all. How would you address Amynias if you met him? Strep: How? Something like, here, here, Amynia! Soc: You see? You call Amynia a woman. Strep: Isn't that right, for someone who28 doesn't serve in the army?29

Earlier in Clouds, Cleonymos had been presented as a deserter who threw off his shield and fled battle (353). Aristophanes in fact uses Cleonymos as a butt of his jokes throughout his career as a playwright. Amynias was one of Strepsiades' creditors. D. E. O'Regan, however, believes that it is not Cleonymos, Amynias, or even Prodicus, Protagoras, or Socrates who are the targets of Aristophanes. She writes that, 'The real target here is the goal of a self-sufficient language, obedient to an abstract set of rules and an abstract 'natural ' world, indifferent to the actual — in this case social — world constituted by what 'we all' ... already know.'30

In his treatise Against the Grammarians (Adversus mathematicos), Sextus Empiricus, the Pyrrhonist sceptic who probably wrote in the second

25 Clouds 660-90. 26 Several commentaries note that this feminine form is probably proposed on the analo­gy of A.eo)v X-ecnva, SepaTwov Oepdjiaiva. See Aristophanes Clouds, ed. L. L. Forman (New York 1915) 154. 27 Compare Aeschylus Agamemnon 1671, 'dX£KTcop OXTTE Oeteiac, neXaq.' 28 Adding to the comic effect, Strepsiades uses rJTic, here. 29 Clouds 684-92. • 30 Daphne Elizabeth O'Regan, Rhetoric, Comedy, and the Violence of Language in Aristophanes' Clouds (New York 1992) 81.

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century C.E., presents the most lengthy and systematic treatment of gram­matical gender of the three authors surveyed here. In the process, he obviously enjoys leveling invective at the opinions of the grammarians and at the grammarians themselves as a group. As a sceptic, Sextus predictably dismisses the passionate disputes of the grammarians as nonsense, their questions as unanswerable.31

Sextus opens his discussion by asking what some grammarians mean when they say certain nouns are 'naturally' (((njrjei.) masculine or feminine, and he challenges them on their position. Is it possible, he asks, that a noun affects us 'as being masculine, even if we do not consider that it is mascu­line, or again naturally indicates that it is feminine, even if we are not willing'? No, he answers, the grammarians, stupid as they are, cannot even agree among themselves about this. Moreover, they cannot refute the fact that, although fire naturally warms both Greeks and barbarians alike, and does not warm Greeks and chill barbarians, the very same noun can be masculine to some groups and feminine to others. For example, the Athenians speak of a jar, f) oxduvoc,, as feminine, but the Peloponnesians as masculine, 6 oxduvoc,. Furthermore, the same group may call the same noun by two different genders, sometimes saying 6 Xnioc, and other times ij Xi\ioq. He argues further that things that are naturally masculine or feminine sometimes do not reflect that fact in their grammatical gender, whereas inanimate objects are often designated grammatically not as neuter, but as masculine or feminine. Therefore, he concludes, the grammarians should

31 Sextus was not alone in poking fun at grammarians as a class. Ineke Sluiter notes that grammarians were often the butt of jokes in antiquity. An example is the following epigram of Palladas, a lamentation on the fate of a donkey which fell into the possession of a grammarian:

'Even for asses there is both good and irksome fortune, and Kronos rules the births of four-footed beasts. For ever since an evil time befell this donkey, It, from an alabarch's palace, became a grammarian's. But bear it patiently then, ass. For to grammarians barley (KpiOij) has no end, but is called only Kpi' (Palatine Anthology 11.383, my translation).

Sluiter explains that 'Kpi was one of the examples the grammarians usually adduced for d7toKOrtf| in Homer. Other examples are 8(5 for Stasia, and udi|/ for \ia\\n5iu>q.' Although Sluiter notes that 'The implication of the grammarians' habit of shortening the form of the word Kpi9ij, is apparently that an equivalent reduction of the donkey's rations of real KpiGrj is to be expected', I see rather a positive outcome for the beast: just as for grammarians KpiGrj has no end, so too the donkey should take heart, for its rations also will be 'without end.' See Ineke Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in Context: Contributions to the Study of Ancient Linguistic Thought (Amsterdam 1990) 36, and 'Perversa Subtilitas. De kwade roep van de grammaticus,' Lampas 21 (1988) 41-65. For more examples from the Palatine Anthology that satirize grammarians, see 11.138, 139, 278, 305, 321, 322, 347, 399.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 39

cease their wrangling about grammatical gender and concede the whole subject as a matter of indifference (d8id(|)opov).32

Thus we see that, contrary to Sly's assertion, gender in language was not 'accepted without question or comment' in the ancient world. Rather, the concept of natural versus grammatical gender was a topic of lively and even comic debate. Our extant sources, however, tend to take the subject lightly, which Philo most certainly does not do.

Philo's transformations of grammatical gender

The passage on Wisdom in Fug. 51-52 quoted above is not the only place in the Philonic corpus where the grammatically feminine form of a noun and Philo's need to maintain his own notions of 'natural ' gender collide. In most instances, it is the feminine that must yield. I will examine two addi­tional examples in which Philo allows the male to sublimate the female and attempt to explain why he might do so in light of Stoic linguistic theory. Then I will turn to another passage in which, uncharacteristically for Philo, personified virtue as a grammatically feminine noun holds her ground.

The first example is brief. In QG 4:18 Philo writes that the soul is 'filled with joy, the name of which is feminine, while its nature is masculine.' Here Philo simply reiterates without the use of personification the essence of his argument in Fug. 51-52. Joy, although grammatically feminine, is by nature masculine.

The second example is from Abr. 101-102, which contrasts bodily mar­riage with the 'meeting of souls.' In this allegory, the husband is the mind (vouq), and the wife, Sarah, is virtue (dpeTT|).

For in that (marriage) of bodies, the male sows, and the female receives the seed. But in the meeting of souls, contrary to this, virtue (dpETfj), which seems to belong to the category of wives, begets to sow good counsels and excellent words and proposals of doctrines that are extremely useful for life. Thought ( oyianoc,), on the other hand, believed to be classified in the category of 'husband,' receives the holy and divine sowings. Or perhaps the statement has lied on account of the deceptiveness of words, since mind (voic,) is masculine and virtue feminine in form and sound (((icovai). But if someone wants to see the naked facts clearly, laying bare the obscuring grammatical terms (K fjceic,), he will know that virtue is male by nature, in as much as it sets in motion and arranges and suggests noble conceptions of noble deeds and words. Thought (Xoyiapoq), however, is female, being moved and trained and helped. On the whole it is classified in the passive state, and this passivity alone is its preservation.

Once again Philo's notions of the proper roles for male and female entities conflict with the grammatical gender of the words themselves. In Philo's

32 Adv. math. 1.142-53.

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view, the names themselves are deceptive; they do not fit into his over­arching philosophy of gender which, like the grammatical theory of Grimm, understands the male as active and the female as passive. So once again Philo must 'pay no attention to the discrepancies in the names;' that is, he must divest the nouns of their feminine grammatical gender so that they conform to his philosophical schema. Hence virtue, the feminine abstract dpeTrj, must be male in its true nature, because it, like ao<()ia in Fug. 51-52, plays the masculine role of the mover and sower of good,33 while the grammatically masculine noun Xoyio^oc,, because it is the passive receiver, must be female.

In Abr. 101 Philo makes the important comment that 'perhaps the state­ment has lied on account of the deceptiveness of words.' Taking this com­ment in tandem with his exhortation in Fug. 52 to 'pay no attention to the discrepancies in names,' the reader may infer that Philo's stance in the fyvoiq/Qeaic, debate is not on the side of nature, but on the side of conven­tion, and even more, that he believes that the conventional imposition of names is often wrong. But in fact his position on language is neither so clear nor so simple.

First we must ask if Philo has a philosophy of language at all. If by 'philosophy of language' one insists on a systematic and sustained analysis of linguistic issues, the answer must be no. But Philo does offer a number of scattered statements which, when examined together, give a fairly good indication of his theories of language, even if these theories are not perfectly consistent.34

One of the most important aspects of linguistic study prior to the time of Philo was the determination and analysis of the parts of speech. The Stoics, who were pioneers in grammatical and linguistic work, named the five inflections of nouns and adjectives as well as terms that expressed the temporal relations of verbs (present, past, etc.).35 Philo does not ignore this topic. He asserts that it is the province of philosophy, and philosophy alone, to examine what a conjunction is, or a noun, or a verb, and the various designations of sentences.36 Further, Philo explicitly addresses the hot topic of the nature/convention debate:

33 Baer notes that Sophia and Arete are 'really equivalent in most of these texts' and, as God's agents, play the male role (Philo's Use 57 fn. 5). 34 Both David Winston and Maren Niehoff, who offer sustained studies of Philo's com­ments on language, believe that Philo does have a philosophy of language. See Niehoff, 'What is in a Name? Philo's Mystical Philosophy of Language,' Jewish Studies Quarterly 2 (1995) 220-52, and Winston, 'Aspects of Philo's Linguistic Theory,' SPhA 3 (1991) 109-25. 35 A. A. Long, 'Stoicism,' Hellenistic Moral Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berke­ley/Los Angeles 1986) 138. 36 Congr. 148-49.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 41

Scripture has cleared up the great perplexity of those who are lovers of wisdom by showing that names exist by being given and not by nature, since each is an apt and naturally suitable name through the skilful calculation of a wise man who is pre­eminent in knowledge. And very proper to the mind of the wise man alone, or rather to the first of earth-born creatures, is the giving of names...37

Thus Philo alights on the side of convention, but with some stipulations. Names are imposed, but when they are imposed, they are 'naturally suit­able' under certain conditions. In this opinion he is in almost complete agreement with the Stoic answer to the tyvoic,/Qeaic, debate, at least as far as we can determine it on the basis of the evidence of Stoic thought available to us, which is notoriously fragmentary. But we can surmise this: the Stoics, too, believed that 'names were formed by human imposition ... Neverthe­less names are natural because they have been imposed in such a way that they naturally reflect the nature of things by somehow imitating them. To bring such an imposition it took wise men who had grasped the nature of things and who knew how best to impose names.'38 Philo is completely consistent with this up to the point of the identity of the namegivers. In this he differs from the Stoics in his insistence that the namegiver is 'the wise man alone, or rather ... the first of earth-born creatures,' that is, Adam.

Greek philosophers said that the wise were the first to give names to things. Moses did better, however, because first of all, [he gave that duty] not to some of the first men, but to the first man, so that just as he was created to be the beginning of the existence of others, in the same way he would be considered the beginning of speech. For if there were no names, neither would there be language. Then, if many people had given names, they would be discordant and disharmonious, with different people assigning [names] differently. But the naming of one man was bound to fit to the thing, and this to be a symbol, the same for all, of the thing to which it refers (T-uyxdvov) and the meaning (ornxaivoixevov). (Leg. 2.15)

In addressing these issues we cannot ignore yet another Philonic passage that reiterates his points, Opif. 149-150, probably Philo's most quoted state­ment on linguistic theory. In this passage Philo states that God grants his human creation the privilege of naming 'so that he might of his own ability impose titles in no way unfitting or incongruous, but [those that] indicated their underlying characteristics (imoKEiiievoov v8i6xr|Ta<;) very well.'39

For since the logical nature in his soul was still pure and unalloyed, and no illness or disease or passion had crept in, and since he received exceedingly pure impressions (<l>avTaaiai) of bodies and things, he assigned names (KA.TJ0EH;) that exactly hit the mark, inferring their meanings very well, so that no sooner were [the names] spoken

37 QG 1.20, re: Gen 2:19, Loeb. 38 Frede, 'Principles of Stoic Grammar,' The Stoics 68. 39 Opif. 149.

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than their natures were apprehended. He excelled in all noble traits to such an extent that he already reached the limit of human happiness.40

There are two aspects of Leg. 2.15 and Opif. 149-50 that are pertinent in determining a hypothesis of Philo's rationale for transformations of gram­matical gender: first, their use of Stoic terminology, and second, the possible influence upon them of the Stoic theory of the demise of language.

Both passages fairly 'bristle with terminology'41 employed in Stoic philo­sophy of language, which topic the Stoics classified as a subgroup under the main heading of dialectic.42 Three of these terms are most pertinent: Tuy%dvov, armaivojievov, and fyavtaaia. In addition, we must add to them the term cficovri, which appears at a crucial point in Abr. 101 and, in light of Stoic language theory, may be significant for Philo's transformation of grammatical gender.

Ineke Sluiter writes that the Stoic theory of language 'comprises the fol­lowing: the Stoics distinguish the form of a word, i.e. the expression (<|>covr|, oriumvov), its meaning (ari(iaiv6|ievov, 8T) OI3(XEVOV, 7tpdyua), and that to which it refers in reality (xt)y%dvov) ... Ocovfj is a physical entity, it is the sound we emit when we say something. Therefore it is corporeal, a od)(xa. The same holds good for the wyxdvov. If there is a man Dion to whom we refer in using the expression Aicov, this Dion is corporeal as well. The naming, on the other hand, is something which can only be thought, it is an drjcoumov'.43

No one needs to prove the fact that Philo was influenced by Stoic thought; it pervades his work. But did he adopt principles of Stoic linguistic theory? On the basis of his specialized use of the terms or|u.cav6|i£vov and xuyxdvov noted above, I believe that it is quite likely that he did. This theory is further substantiated if we look at Philo's placement of the words (t>covrj and tyavxaaia.

That voice / sound, or (jxovfj, is corporeal to the Stoics, is confirmed by Diogenes Laertius through his citation the Physics of Chrysippus, among other worthies. 'For whatever produces an effect is body; and voice, as it proceeds from those who utter it to those who hear it, does produce an effect.'44 Philo, too, seems to have believed that voice is corporeal, and for

40 Opif. 150. 41 A slight restatement and reapplication of the words of Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in Context 20. 42 Diogenes Laertius 7.44. 'The second main heading ...belonging to dialectic is that of language, wherein are included written language and the parts of speech, with a dis­cussion of errors in syntax and in single words...'. All translations from DL here are from Loeb. 43 Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in Context 22-23. 44 DL 7.55-56.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 43

the same reasons as the Stoics, describing it as 'an impact on the air made by the organs of mouth and tongue' .45

In light of the theories of the corporeal (txovfj and the incorporeal orpcavouxvov, let us revisit Abr. 101-02:

Or perhaps the statement has lied on account of the deceptiveness of words, since mind (votJc,) is masculine and virtue (dpsTfj) feminine in form and sound (<]>G)vat).46 But if someone wants to see the naked facts clearly, laying bare the obscuring grammatical terms, he will know that virtue is male by nature...

The nouns vovc, and dpexfj are grammatically gendered not only in form, but also in their sound. And sound is a corporeal, which, to Philo, is inher­ently inferior to an incorporeal. This observation, too, requires no argu­ment here, as it is a constant throughout the Philonic corpus. Philo may therefore dispense with such unimportant matters as grammatical gender, voiced as it is in corporeal sound, and pursue the true meanings (oruiaivo-I^Eva) of the words in question, which we may assume are, as the Stoics believed, incorporeal.

But this vocabulary of sound and meaning, corporeal and incorporeal, does nothing to aid our understanding of Bathouel and wisdom in Fug. 51-52. To address this, we need to turn to the Stoic understanding of ((xxviaciia.

To the Stoics, a <)>avTcicda, that is, a presentation or mental impression, 'is an imprint on the soul: the name having been appropriately borrowed from the imprint made by the seal upon the wax.' Some of these presenta­tions are accurate and agree with the real object, and some are not and do not.47 According to Philo, the impressions that Adam received were most certainly the former. But this does not hold true for all impressions per­ceived by everyone:

If it were always the case that the same objects produced the same impressions (<))avTaaiai) on the mind without any variation, it would perhaps be necessary that the two instruments of judgement which nature has established in us, sense and mind, should be held in high esteem as veracious and incorruptible, and that we should not suspend our judgement on any point through doubt but accept a single presentation of two different objects, and on the faith of this choose one and reject the other. But since we prove to be differently affected by them at different times, we can say nothing with certainty about anything, because the picture presented to us is not constant, but subject to changes manifold and multiform.48

45 Migr. 47. But see also Migr. 52. 46 An alternative translation of $covai in this context is 'language' or 'word,' and so Philo may not have been referring to 'sound.' But in the light of his other uses of Stoic terminology, the translation of 'sound' may be put forward for consideration. 47 DL 7.45. 48 Ebr. 169-70, Loeb.

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Adam, the first name giver, received impressions that were 'exceedingly pure,' and Philo implies that he did so because his soul itself was pure and unalloyed, unaffected by negative elements. But in the passage above, Ebr. 169-70, Philo asserts that we, humanity en masse, are 'differently affected' by the same impressions at different times, and thus 'we can say nothing with certainty about anything.' Although Philo does not make a link here between Adam's perspicacious grasp of a ^avxaaia and the quite imperfect perceptions of others, we are probably justified in making that leap, for he notes that in Adam 'the logical nature in his soul was still pure and unalloyed, and no illness or disease or passion had crept in.' This surely implies that such was not the case for Adam's descendents, with very rare exceptions.49

Philo states this idea strongly in Her. 69-72, relating the migration of the heir, allegorized and personified as the soul, from its father's house, that is, the Xoyoq:50

I migrated from the Wyoc, when I discovered its great d^oyict, even though it exalted itself and puffed itself up. For its audacity was not small, to point me to bodies through shadows [and] facts through words (prjiiaTct), which was an impossible task. And even when it was baffled, it chattered incessantly and gushed, unable by means of the ambiguities of names (ovoyiaza) to render the special characteristics of the underlying facts (-UJIOKEIUEVCOV iSiotriTac,) clearly.

Philo's opinions on this matter are quite close to those of the Stoics, who believed that even if in the beginning language was given by wise men, and

49 Winston, 'Aspects of Philo's Linguistic Theory,' outlines these exceptions, namely Abraham, Isaac, and above all, Moses. But Winston believes that Philo overstates his case even when it comes to Moses: 'We must therefore conclude that Philo's claim that the Mosaic names differ in no wise from the external object that they represent can only be the result of an exaggerated attempt on his part to emphasize the absolute precision of Mosaic name-making. What he undoubtedly intended to say was only that the Mosaic names are the best in their class and convey better than any others the inherently limited kind of information that any names are ultimately capable of transmitting. His irrepressible urge to one-upmanship in his portrayal of the unique qualities of the great Jewish prophet led him in this case to make an assertion that clearly transgressed the bounds of his own epistemological principles' (125). Another scholar whose work must be mentioned at this juncture is David Dawson (Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria [Berkeley 1992]). Dawson asserts that for Philo language in the post-Adamic world is, like Adam, fallen (88-92). This is an overstated, overly theological way to make the point that this paper suggests in a more restrained fashion. 50 Here we find yet another term that is pervasive in Philo being employed in a sense that immediately suggests Stoic linguistic theory. In the context of both this passage and in Stoic language theory, the Xoyoq is a significant sound or utterance, a corporeal; cf. A. C. Lloyd, 'Grammar and Metaphysics in the Stoa,' Problems in Stoicism, ed. A. A. Long (London 1971) 60. The other two entities that the personified soul deserts, the land (the body) and its kin (the senses) are the epitome of corporeality in Philonic thought.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 45

a name reflected the nature of the thing, it gradually underwent corruption through the addition or subtraction of letters from words, or from other more profound change. The Stoic response to this situation was the practice of etymology. 'It is the task of etymology to follow these changes as it were in the reverse direction and so to arrive at the original form — and therefore at the same time the original and true meaning — of the word in question.'51

This is what Philo does in Fug. 51-52, albeit in a roundabout way. The etymology of Bathouel is 'daughter of God.' But the daughter of God is wisdom, and wisdom is a grammatically feminine noun. However, lan­guage is no longer true to its origins; it 'chatters and gushes' and can't properly correlate the word and the thing. Elsewhere, Philo sees that 'no single thing presents itself to us in its own absolute nature, but all contain interlacings and intermixtures of the most complicated kind.'52 We could with reason surmise that not least among the elements of this unfortunate farrago is the relationship between a word's grammatical gender and its natural gender — or, at least, the essence of its natural gender as Philo believes it should be. Grammatical gender, instead of clarifying, often obstructs meaning. Hence Philo without compunction may maintain the etymological meaning of Bathouel, daughter of God, and at the same time correct the misleading terminology of grammatical gender, thus uncover­ing the essential truth behind imperfect language.

However, Philo is not always consistent in the actual working out of his philosophy of language: he does not always transform grammatical gender in order to make it cohere with his hierarchy of masculine and feminine. A notable example of this occurs in Sacr. 20-34. Here Philo takes up and adapts Prodicus' allegory of Heracles' choice between two women who represent two ways, the one the toilsome road of virtue and the other the deceptively pleasurable one of vice (Xen. Mem. 2.1.21-34). In the texts of both Philo and Xenophon, the abstract nouns virtue (dpexfj) and vice or pleasure (Kaida or f|8ovri) appear personified as women.53 In the context of Philo's discussion, Virtue and Pleasure represent the two wives of Deut 21:15-17, one hated (Virtue) and the other loved (Pleasure).54 Consequently, the reader finds in Sacr. 20-34 complete congruity of grammatical and

51 Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in Context 18. 52 Ebr. 189. 53 Both Xenophon and Philo label the 'positive' figure of their respective allegories Virtue, but they differ in their designations of the 'negative' figure. In Xenophon she is KaKia, Vice, but in Philo f|8ovrj, Pleasure. Nevertheless, the two figures, though bearing different names, play the same function in the narrative. 54 Cf. Leg. 2.48.

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natural gender. But this instance is an anomaly, for Philo rarely employs feminine imagery for a positive trait such as virtue.55

As we have seen, Philo writes elsewhere that the true nature of virtue is male, in spite of its grammatically feminine form. In Abr. 102, cited above, Philo states that 'virtue is male,' and he then proceeds unapologetically to characterize it as male. He reiterates this view later in Sacr. itself: 'The female offspring of the soul is vice and passion ... the male offspring is health of the soul and virtue.'56 Why, then, did Philo not transform the personified Virtue of Sacr. 20-34 into a male? He clearly has proven himself fully capable of such reversals. If indeed he does believe that language is corrupted, why does he not consistently apply his rather forcible methods of linguistic redemption to this passage?

As Annewies van den Hoek writes, 'One cannot simply make an equa­tion between interpretation A and interpretation B or explain one through the other, since the interpretations first have to be seen in the context in which they were developed.'57 In Philo's adaptation of Prodicus, there is both an internal and an external context. The internal, or scriptural, context for the allegory is the two wives of Deut 21. Although Philo obviously does not hold himself bound to the feminine gender of scriptural characters in his allegorical commentaries, in Sacr. the two wives of Deut 21 cohere exact­ly with the two women of Prodicus' Heracles. The similarities may have exerted an irresistible force upon his characterization. In addition, there is an external, or larger social context in which Philo develops his allegory. The story of Heracles' choice was well-known in antiquity, and Philo may have felt that it had an 'organic rootedness in the popular culture of the time.'58 For these two reasons, Philo may have eschewed a transformation of the feminine noun Virtue into a male, and he allows the context(s) of his work to override a more general philosophical consistency.

However, a possible objection to the argument of the external context, that is, the 'organic rootedness' of the allegory in the culture, can be raised on the basis of other authors' treatments of the allegory of Prodicus, which enjoyed a lively Nachleben in the ancient world. Philo's near contemporary Dio Chrysostom describes Virtue's female companions, also personified abstract nouns, as 'like men,' and he adds to their number a personifed

55 There are of course exceptions to this. One of the most obvious is the comparison of Rebecca with Laban. Rebecca is assigned to the rational part of the soul and Laban to the irrational. See QG 4.117-18; Somn. 1.45. 56 Sacr. 103. 57 Van den Hoek, 'Endowed with Reason or Glued to the Senses' 64. 58 Mattila, 'Wisdom,' 112. This statement is in answer to Mattila's question of why Philo did not try to transform the figures of Wisdom or the Virtues into men throughout the entire corpus of his work.

PHILO, PERSONIFICATION, AND GRAMMATICAL GENDER 47

male, Law (N6|ioc,).59Also notable is Lucian's parody of the allegory. Lucian preserves the two feminine figures, one positive and one negative, in his parody, but in a truly audacious twist, he explicitly attributes masculine characteristics to the negative figure rather than to the positive one, as the reader presumably would expect.60 Thus for Dio and Lucian, at least, the fame of Prodicus' allegory did not render its feminine figures untouchable. While this does not prove anything about Philo's attitudes toward the allegory, it does demonstrate that Prodicus' story was not sacrosanct in the culture. It seems more likely that in maintaining a congruity of grammatical and natural gender in Sacr. 20-34, Philo was influenced by his internal, scriptural context.

In summary, the concept of grammatical gender, like gender itself, could set the stage for comic reversal, as we have seen in most especially in Aristophanes and Sextus Empiricus. But for Philo, the conflict between natural and grammatical gender was not an occasion for humor. Although he was not the first to probe the boundaries of grammatical gender, he did pursue it to its limits and perhaps beyond. Much was at stake for Philo in this exercise, and thus he did not have the option of treating the gramma­tical structure of language lightly. Aristophanes as a comic dramatist may well poke fun at the ambiguous sexuality or feminine character of a Cleonymos or Amynias, but to subject Virtue or the Wisdom of God to a comedic treatment is of course utterly unthinkable. Philo's transformations of grammatical gender, aided to no small degree by the linguistic philoso­phy of his Stoic predecessors, serve an entirely different function, which is to attempt to correct corrupt language, and to make each word cohere more closely to its true nature — at least, that is, its true nature as seen by Philo. And for him, this is no laughing matter.

University of Notre Dame

59 Dialogue 1.52-84. 60 Lucian Somnium.

J