A Moment in Philo

There's a photo from the twenties, I think, with all the pioneers of quantum physics in it, everyone from Albert Einstein to Marie Curie to Heisenberg and Schroedinger. Being who I am, I look at a picture like that and think of what an exciting time it must have been to live, to be with all those groundbreaking figures all in the same place. Cambridge was a little like that in the early twentieth century, with Wittgenstein and other well known names in philosophy, economics, and literature.

At the podium today in the Philo Group was John Dillon, a slightly quirky British philosopher whose greatest claim to fame as far as I'm concerned is a book called The Middle Platonists. On the platform with him were the likes of scholars like Ellen Birmbaum, Erich Gruen, James Royse, David Runia, and Annewies van den Hoek. You may not know these names, but they are the picture of a generation of Philo scholars.

As I looked around the room there was David Winston, Greg Sterling, Peder Borgen, James Royse. I'm not sure if Hindy Najman was there. The next generation of Philo scholars was there too. The ones I knew in particular were George van Kooten, an old Durham friend, and Ron Cox. I remember speaking with him at Durham to try to convince him to come as a student, but alas Notre Dame won him instead. Now he's light years beyond me and teaching at Pepperdine.

My apologies to Torrey Seland, who in afterthought I suspected must have been there--and he was. I've never met Torrey, so I didn't recognize him. He now has some pictures of the event on his blog:

John Dillon
Erich Gruen's response to Dillon
Ellen Birmbaum's response to Dillon

At one point, Sean Freyne entered the room late and then his cell phone went off as he arrived at a seat in the front of the room leading him to complete a circle around a section of chairs and back out the door again.

In fact, there were far more laughs than you would expect in an esoteric session on Philo's De Abrahamo. Dillon himself is the stereotypical Englishman whose abrupt and unexpected asides jerk you from conjectural emendations to the Philonic text. And just as amorphously as he talks he suddenly decides that his time is up and he stops and sits down.

Then Gruen begins to throw around words like menopause and Sarah's obvious laugh about sex at 99. It was the best kept secret of SBL, a small little room of friends who know each other's minute, painstaking work in the greatest of detail. The main one missing was David Hay, who died suddenly earlier in the year.

As far as I know, they didn't take a picture (maybe they did, I had to leave early). But this room today was the picture--the greatest Philo scholars of a generation...