Only every once in a while (and not that often in one scholarly generation) a book comes along that not only changes fundamentally the perspective on its chosen topic, but, through its novel methodology, will have major repercussions for other fields of scholarship as well. Maren Niehoff’s intellectual biography of Philo of Alexandria is such a work.

As someone who herself has been guilty of ‘the eclecticism of modern scholars, who use passages from Philo’s later and earlier works interchangeably, without awareness of their respective historical and philosophical contexts’ (p. 226), this reviewer is in a good position to assess how, indeed, Niehoff’s reconstruction of the sequence of Philo’s work would change profoundly the way in which we read him. The crux of Niehoff’s new approach is the claim that Philo’s embassy to Rome (38-41CE) on behalf of the Jewish community in Alexandria, after an outbreak of ethnic violence, is a watershed for his oeuvre. From then on, the author claims, Philo will go on to inscribe his self-fashioning and Jewish identity into distinctly Roman discourses, in which the form of Stoicism exemplified primarily by Seneca plays a central role.