 In Stoicism, virtue, or human perfection, is the natural end (telos) of the programming of mankind by Providence. In Philo, things are more complex because of Original Sin. For the Stoics, there was no ontologisation of evil in a world which was entirely rational, and to become as perfect as God was not an absurd project. Philo lived in a period when most philosophers chose a more modest purpose: to become like God as far as possible by flying from the earthly sphere to the heavenly realm (Plato, Theaetetus 176 a–b). To live in the least imperfect way was the goal, a goal which had some similarities with the Stoic figure of the prokoptôn, the person making moral progress. Philo knew the different aspects of this figure and gave his own interpretation of it in Agr. 15. The striving towards a lesser imperfection could take three forms, a division with Platonic/Pythagorean origin but embodied by the example of the patriarchs. Abraham embodies the effort to know, in traveling from astrology to real comprehension of nature, then from the comprehension of nature to “the maker and father of the world”; Isaac symbolizes the happy nature, “the new race, superior to reason and truly divine” (Fug. 168); and Jacob, the struggle against senses and passions. Philo stresses the fact that each of these three types is present in the other two (Abr. 52–53). From a formal point of view, the relation among the three types is not fundamentally different from that of the virtues in the Stoic system which aims to reconcile the unity of the whole and the specificity of each element.