 Philo’s general vision of mankind is often pessimistic. In Ios. 30, he uses the Stoic metaphor of the world as a huge city, but a city ruled by violence and hatred. The main cause of this disaster is the reign of passion, a theme very often evoked in the philosophy of his time. In his exegesis of the Biblical passages relating to human errors, Philo uses many philosophical terms and metaphors. Sometimes, he uses a Platonizing description of passion, recalling the description of the winged team of horses in Phaedrus 253 c–e. At the same time, in many texts, he refers to the Stoic division of passions, with four bad passions (pathê): desire, fear, sadness, and pleasure, and three good passions, joy, caution, and will. But his use of this Stoic division is not strictly faithful to the original. In his allegorical interpretation of Det. 119–120, Philo contrasts bad and good passions, but he introduces hope and repentance, biblical virtues, among the latter. It was not simply a terminological change, but the sign of a deep ontological change. In Stoic doctrine, only the present exists. To be a sage means to understand that the past and the future have no real existence, but are mainly spaces of projection for passions. By introducing hope and repentance among good passions, Philo, without renouncing a complete, or at least as complete as possible, control of bad passions, opened a path going from psychology to transcendentalist ethics. 