 But just after, he evokes the violent envy of those who plunged him “in[to] the ocean of civil cares”, likely an allusion to the many difficulties created by the hostility of Greeks and Egyptians (Spec. 3.1). Even before this violence, however, the environment he faced was a hostile and resentful one. Philo considered the Egyptians, his “ultimate other” (Niehoff 2001), the most disgusting of polytheists because of their zoolatry. He was full of reverence and fear toward the Romans, or at least pretends as such in his two books on the pogrom of 38 CE: the In Flaccum, which is against the Roman prefect in Alexandria at the moment of the pogrom, and the Legatio (Smallwood 1961) in which he narrates his own experience of the embassy sent to the Emperor Caligula by the Jews of Alexandria after the riot. Recently Niehoff stressed the idea that Roman culture had become an important element of Philo’s identity (Niehoff 2018). Nevertheless, he was first and foremost a Jew of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible (ca 270 BCE). That is to say, however distinctive his views, he was a sincerely pious Jew. He knew very little Hebrew, though he went to Jerusalem to pray and offer sacrifices in the Temple (Prov. 2.107), and he thought that the Bible written in Greek was perfectly equivalent to the Hebrew one (Mos. 2.40). His paideia or Greek education was excellent, both in philosophy and the liberal arts, as he says in Congr. 79–80: 