Allegorical Reading and Writing in the Epic Traditions of Classical Antiquity

Abstract

This chapter surveys the history of personification, allegorical reading (allegoresis), and allegorical writing in classical antiquity, chiefly through the tradition of narrative and didactic hexameter epos, from Homer and Hesiod to late antiquity. The development of personification in Virgil, Ovid, Statius, and Prudentius is determinative for much of the postclassical tradition. Fable is used as a cloak for speaking to power. Allegorization of the Homeric epics goes back to the beginning of critical activity on the poems, extracting truths about the natural and moral worlds, a tradition that receives its greatest elaboration in the exegesis of the Stoics and the later Platonists. Allegoresis feeds back into allegorical writing in Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, and Apuleius.