 By this period in Alexandria, the spirit of mutual comprehension that marked the beginning of the Ptolemaic epoch (ca 332 BCE–30 BCE) had faded away. In his own person, Philo brought together two elements that the Greek elite now held to be incompatible: paideia, Greek education, and Judaism. He studied and commented on the Bible in the synagogues, which he describes as “schools of virtue”. His understanding of rhetoric was not merely theoretical. He was probably a great orator. The addressees of his treatises were foremost the Jews, both believers and unbelievers. He may have had a second, much more hypothetical, audience in mind as well: Greek philosophers and intellectuals more generally. However, to the best of our knowledge, this latter group paid scant attention to Philo’s writings. In the fragments of Greek and Roman writers carefully collected by Menahem Stern (1974), we find two kinds of Greek reactions towards Judaism. In the earlier period, they received some sympathy from philosophers; Theophrastus, the main disciple of Aristotle, writes in a famous fragment that Jews are “philosophers by race”, saying about them: 