Philo of Alexandria, also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt. Philo's deployment of allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy was the first documented of its kind, and thereby often misunderstood. Philo often advocated a literal understanding of the Torah and the historicity of such described events, while at other times favoring allegorical readings. Scholars think Philo's marriage of Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy provided a formula later picked up by other exegetes in the 3rd and 4th centuries C.E.