Equally remarkable and equally suggestive is Philo's treatment of the dietary laws. We have seen that he placed them under the governing principle of the tenth commandment, "Thou shalt not covet," or, more broadly, "Thou shalt not have base desires." The dietary laws are at once a symbol and a discipline of temperance and self-control. We know that the Greeks, as soon as they had a superficial knowledge of Jewish observance, jeered at the barbarous and stupid superstition of refusing to eat pork. Again we are told in the letter of the false Aristeas that when Ptolemy's ambassadors went to Jerusalem, to summon learned men to translate the Torah into Greek, Eleazar, the high priest, instructed them in the deeper moral meaning of the dietary laws. Further, in the fourth book of the Maccabees--an Alexandrian sermon upon the Empire of Right Reason--we find an eloquent defence of these same laws as the precepts of reason which fortify our minds. Philo, then, is following a tradition, but he improves upon it. Accepting the Platonic psychology, which divided the soul into reason, temper (_i.e._, will), and desire, he shows how the aim of the Mosaic law about food is to control desire and will, so as to make them subservient to reason. By practicing self-restraint in the two commonest actions of life--eating and drinking--the Israelite acquires it in all things. The hard ascetic who would root out bodily desires errs against human nature, but the wise legislator controls them and curbs them by precepts, so that they are bent to the higher reason. Modern apologists for Judaism have been found who, trying to force science to support their tottering faith, allege that the dietary law is hygienic. Philo relies on no such treacherous reed. We may not eat, he says,[165] the flesh of the pig or shell-fish, not because they are unhealthy, but because they are the sweetest and most delightful of all food, and for that very reason they are marks of the sensual life. This and this alone is the true religious justification of the dietary law.