Dirk Obbink begins an essay on “Early Greek Allegory” with the following: “Where and when the

impulse to read poems allegorically emerged is impossible to say”1. Naturally, he proceeds to

speculate in detail on exactly that topic. I intend to do something similar here; whilst confessing it
difficult to identify the precise moment of genesis for specifically “Alexandrian” allegory, I intend
to propose the most significant factors that drove its development.

However, before I proceed onto the meat (or Quorn, for my vegetarian comrades) of the
presentation, let me offer a definition of allegory. What Obbink blithely calls allegory was known to
pre-Alexandrian Greeks not as allegoria but rather as hyponoia. When at home, a hyponoia means
“under-thought”, or perhaps rather “hidden meaning”. Sometimes, as in Theagenes of Rhegium,
these hyponoia are “discovered” in Homer's poetry “as a mode of defending apparently
blasphemous passages”2. In other cases, as with Plato, they are invented whole cloth to explain a
concept. As Stuart Small has demonstrated, Homer himself certainly included intentional hyponoia
in his epics3.

Allegoria, on the other hand, derives from allegorein – “to speak otherly”, to say one thing at face
value but intend alternative or additional meanings at another level. This is the term used by,
amongst others, Cicero, Paul, and Heraclitus of Alexandria – but to describe what? Well, that's
rather the purpose of my PhD to define, so allow me to offer just a working definition: allegory is a
practice definition by various non-literal or figural interpretive methods, including typology,
traditional substitutionary allegories, literary readings, spiritual etymologies, and more; it is
inspired, at one level at least, by the conviction that the sacred text being interpreted is so excellent
as to be capable of deeper levels of interpretation than face value.

So various authors in the Hellenistic era called this type of interpretation allegory – our first extant
uses of that term by its users are in Philo Judaeus and Paul4, who write about the same time in the
first half of the first century AD – both interpreting the Jewish Scriptures. Presumably neither
coined it, and a similar allegorical programme to Philo is pursued by the Jewish philosopher
Aristobulus, writing in about 160 BC5. Cicero's use of it (albeit in critique) certainly allows us to
date the term at least a hundred years before Paul and Philo. Aristobulus wrote in Alexandria like
Philo; without spending any longer on the point now, I think it fair to say that the term allegory can
be properly applied to Aristobulus where it cannot be applied to hyponoia. Arisotobulus is
undertaking the same sort of systematic exposition of sacred text as Philo or Heraclitus, inspired by
the same zeitgeist motifs, where Theagenes was not. The remainder of this paper will be spent
outlining these motifs or inspirations, and how they caused the haphazard and non-reflexive
hyponoia to be turned into a coherent method of interpretation that held a place above the salt at the
literary table into the modern era.

I intend to look at three main influences today, which can be summed up with the following
subsections: the Nation's Builder, the Nation's Poet, and the Nation's Philosopher. Finally, I'll
suggest a Need for Synthesis between these three influences, before concluding with a Suggestive
Postscript.

Let's talk about the Nation's Builder, first – Alexander of Macedon. One cannot say that Alexander
built the Greek nation – indeed, the first victim of his father Philip's ambitions was precisely the
patchwork of city states that made up the only ethnic and cultural body that could meaningfully be
called Greece. The last flower of Athenian democracy – Demosthenes – was certainly one of its
1 D. Obbink. “Early Greek allegory”. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, edited by Rita Copeland and Peter T.
Struck. Cambridge: CUP, 2010: 15.
2 J. Tate. “The Beginnings of Greek Allegory”. The Classical Review, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Dec., 1927): 214.
3 Stuart G.P. Small. “On Allegory in Homer”. The Classical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 7 (Apr., 1949): 424.
4 Galatians 4.21-31 and nearly everything in Philo's corpus.
5 His fragmenta are contained in Eusebius, Praep. Evang. 8.X and 13.XII.
most impressive, but oratory and courage could not stand in the way of phalanxes, and finally
Classical Greece was extinguished forever. After Philip's death, Demosthenes led the Greeks in one
last attempt at freedom, which ended in 335 with Alexander burning Thebes. No, Alexander did not
build the Greek nation – but he built a Greek nation. Alexander turned the eastern Mediterranean
into a Greek-speaking lake, and founded a city on the Nile Delta to replace all that had been lost
with the crushing of Boetia, Attica, and the Peloponnesus. In what I am sure was simply a fair
recognition of achievement, he named it Alexandria.

In multiple respects, this new Hellenistic empire was an enormous culture shock for the Greeks as
much as for any conquered nation. The proud polis – the city state where enfranchised citizens
existed as relative equals, whether under a monarchy or democracy – gave way to an empire, and
after Alexander's death, to a pack of squabbling dictators. One of those, Ptolemy the First – who
modestly granted himself the sobriquet of Soter, that is, saviour – controlled Egyptian Alexandria as
his capital. Now, the location of this new metropolis – in Egypt – was by no means accidental, nor
did it lack cultural context. Egypt was a wealthy province, the Nile was the strategic key to the
south-east Mediterranean – and, one suspects more to the point, Egypt was the cause of a long-term
Greek inferiority complex. To the Greek, as Aristotle put it, “the most ancient is the most revered”6 -
and Egypt was patently more ancient than Greece, or indeed any other contemporary civilisation –
the imperial masters of Egypt, Persia, were even younger than the Greeks.

One example will suffice to demonstrate the sort of emotional power Egypt held over the Greeks.
Herodotus records a story of his visit to the Egyptian priests at Thebes – he says that Hecataeus the
Historian had claimed to these priests that he was descended by sixteen generations from a
demigod. Though Herodotus himself made no such claim, the priests treated him as they had
Hecataeus – they took him to a vast room full of statues. Each of these statues was of a former
hereditary high priest of the Temple – each a son of the previous high priest, whose statue was the
next in line. There were three hundred and forty five statues in the room – and none descended from
a god or demigod7. We do not know if Hecataeus' belief was exploded by this – but we can certainly
imagine the effect. Certainly Herodotus nearly always favours Egyptian theories in matters of
theology, precisely because of this antiquity of tradition. With the conquest of Egypt, this ancient –
and thereby both admirable and threatening – civilisation was no longer a foreign land, but part of
the Hellenic empire.

So Alexander saw to the end of Classical Greek polis, and by conquering Egypt attenuated the
Greek inferiority complex towards the Egyptians. These two factors were undoubtedly very
significant in the intellectual life of the new Hellenistic world, destroying the old status quo and
extending the boundaries of thought for learned Greeks. I'll add one further political decision at the
dawn of this new era which had very serious ramifications. Ptolemy I Soter, the first Egyptian King
after Alexander, is the most likely candidate for founder of the great Library of Alexandria8. Here he
sought to gather the world's stock of literature together – aiming for up to 500,000 books, in one
story9. All sorts of draconian measures were undertaken to fill the Library. Soter also seems to have
founded the adjoining Museum, where he gathered textual critics to study the Library's contents.
They undertook to secure the texts of the great Greek classics, such as Homer – much as Biblical
scholars do nowadays in their own field – and present the “authentic” text, with commentary10.
When combined with the other factors I'll explain, the creation of a trained corps of scholars
provided exactly the resource the development of a systematic allegorical method would require.

6 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 983b.

7 Herodotus, Histories, II.143.
8 At least, according to The Letter of Aristeas, which I believe can be trusted in this case. See Aristeas 9 and
elsewhere.
9 Aristeas 10.
10 See, e.g., J.D. Dawson. Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria. Berkeley, Ca.: University
of California Press, 1992: 66.
But what of the works they edited? The most ancient is the most revered – and so, as Lamberton
puts it, “the Iliad and the Odyssey were thus inevitably placed in a position of very great honor and
inspired an awe”11 amongst the Greeks. He wrote the Greek national epic, too – a tale of where the
Greeks came from, a Heroic age of demigods and great deeds. If we remember that Hecataeus
boasted of his divine descent, we may see that Homer authenticated this – the Greeks were a race of
heavenly ancestry. That the Romans chose the Trojan cycle for the origin of their race, and that
Virgil chose Homer as the model for his attempt at national epic, should also be indicative of how
Homer was patriotically perceived in antiquity..

So Homer's antiquity ensured his trustworthiness; as Semonides of Ceos later wrote, “Ponder the
saying of a man of old – for Homer's tongue escaped [oblivion;] // all-conquer[ing time has spared
him, never dimmed his name,] // [and never found his testimony] false.”12. He was furthermore
trustworthy because his stories told of the great history of the Greek people. The fact that he spoke
of the gods made him at some level a trustworthy theologian. Indeed, all of the oldest strata of
Greek literature concerned the gods, whether as central characters or as observers – not just Homer,
but also Hesiod, Orpheus, and the official oracles of the gods all heavily involved the Olympic
pantheon. Furthermore, Homer, like those oracles, was written in hexameter, the most solemn of
verse forms for the Greeks.

And yet it must be frankly confessed that Homer is not a particularly solemn poet – that awe and
respect, as Lamberton observes, must have jarred badly with some of the episodes of the Iliad and
Odyssey. What of Zeus and Hera's marital tiff, the happy resolution of which causes such chaos for
the Greeks13 - or again, what of Demodocus' decidedly scandalous Song of Ares and Aphrodite14?
That could hardly be the truth about the gods – which put the Greeks in a nice bind. Yet the fact that
the other hexametrical theological documents were often intentionally obscure – and Homer's own
hyponoia – offered the Greeks some hope of recovering this particular sacred text from charges of
impiety. This job was left to the philosophers, to whom we'll move next.

We've discussed the Nation's Builder, Alexander, and the Nation's Poet, Homer. But what about the
Nation's Philosopher, Plato? All of the major antique schools of philosophy bar one – Epicureanism
– traced their descent from Plato15. The major allegorists were all, whether directly or indirectly, the
philosophical children of Plato. Yet it must be said that Plato himself refused to allegorise Homer,
and was indeed a trenchant critic of any attempt at drawing theology or morality from the poet. He
was not the first philosopher to attack the Greek reliance upon Homer – Xenophanes had decried
the situation, saying that “Both Homer and Hesiod have attributed to the gods all things that are
shameful and a reproach among mankind: theft, adultery, and mutual deception”16. Heracleitus of
Ephesus had a solution to this: “Homer deserves to be flung out of the contests and given a
beating”17.

But the most devastating attack on Homer – the most detailed, the most articulate, the most
sensitive – came from Plato. On multiple occasions in his works Plato finds reason to – whether
directly or indirectly – criticise Homer. His chief volley, however, comes in Book 2 of his

11 R. Lamberton. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition.
Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1986: 11.
12 GLP, Semonides Elegy 20.
13 Iliad I.
14 Odyssey VIII.255-366.
15 J. Braunschweig and D. Sedley. “Hellenistic philosophy”. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman
Philosophy, edited by D. Sedley. Cambridge: 165.
16 APS, Xenophanes Fragment 12.
17 APS, Heracleitus Fragment 42.
Republic18. Here, Socrates wryly observes in connection with the old epic poets that “telling the
greatest falsehood about the most important things doesn't make a fine story”19. Homer (and Hesiod,
and the others) tell deceits on a grand scale about the most important things – that is, matters of
religion. The problem with that is that it will deceive or corrupt the young (ironically, the very
charges for which Socrates was executed). Plato has Socrates declare that, in the ideal polis
Socrates and his disciples would found, impious stories simply won't be allowed in. Socrates very
specifically names and shames Homer's depictions of the gods warring as an example of the stories
to be banned20.

Of interest here is the term Plato uses to describe certain types of interpretation which seek to draw
a positive moral from these great falsehoods – Grube translates Socrates' judgement as follows:
“The young can't distinguish what is allegorical from what isn't, and the opinions they absorb at that
age are hard to erase and apt to become unalterable. For these reasons, then, we should probably
take the utmost care to insure that the first stories they hear about virtue are the best ones to hear”21.
And yet the word here is not some form of allegoria – rather, the word is hyponoia. At any rate,
what hyponoia is Plato responding to here?

I mentioned Theagenes of Rhegium before – he is identified by Porphyry, a Neoplatonist allegorist

as “the first to write about Homer”22 in an 'allegorical' manner. Theagenes worked in the 520s BC,
though Tate suggests that the spiritual interpretation of Homer began even earlier, with Pherocydes
of Samia in the first half of the sixth century BC23. If one were to link Theagenes with a
philosophical movement, it would be the Pythagoreans, who were certainly active in Rhegium at
that time24. Socrates died in 399 BC, and Plato's own career started after that point. Plato, then, is
responding to a tradition of philosopher and grammarians who sought to treat Homer as if he were
offering Delphic oracles, rather than simple entertaining fiction. Both the entertaining fiction and
the spiritualised interpretation were dangerous, and Plato preferred to see them gone.

Nor even was it Platonists who began to fashion the interpretation of hyponoia into a self-conscious
allegoria. Rather, it was a perennial student of philosophy, Zeno of Citium, along with his
successors Crates of Thebes and Chrysippus, who began to popularise a more structured and
systematic allegorizing of Homer. Zeno founded the school of Stoicism, which was one of the most
influential philosophical schools in the ancient world – indeed, one of its classic late works is by the
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the last of the so-called “Good Emperors”. Zeno had studied at
the Platonic Academy, as well as with the Megaric off-shoot of the Socratic tradition; he also
studied under Crates the Cynic25, and in his school formalised the world-defying philosophy of the
famous Diogenes – who, incidentally, was a lunatic of both the highest but also the best order. The
early Stoics positioned themselves as true heirs to Socrates' legacy, claiming the Academy had
fallen into ignorance26.

But if Plato were so robust in his opposition to spiritualizing Homer's defects away – and if his
direct successors were the avowed opponents of the first systematic allegorists – in what way was
Plato a decisive influence upon the development of Homeric, and later Biblical, allegory? Well, in
part precisely because of that rejection, as I shall return to. But partly because Plato hanged himself
by his own petard – he adopts the imagistic quality of an allegory in what we now dub the Allegory

18 See also his Ion.

19 Plato, Republic 378a.
20 Republic 378d.
21 Republic 378e.
22 Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, 32.
23 Tate, Beginnings of Greek Allegory, 214.
24 Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, 31f.
25 Braunschweig and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophy, 166.
26 Lamberton, Homer the Theologian, 56.
of the Cave, where he visually depicts the effects of education and ignorance, especially in relation
to the true, spiritual nature of the universe27. This is avowedly intentional, where Plato would
evidently claim that Homer meant none of the deep meanings dragged forth by his interpreters. Yet
Plato, in this attempt to create new and useful mythic stories to describe the actual state of affairs –
and he made many others – left a rather significant hole in his lines. Whilst dismissing allegorical
interpretation of Homer, he legitimised allegory itself as a literary form. If one were inclined to
defend Homer, one need look no further than the Nation's Philosopher to see that intentional
allegories were composed by great philosophers.

I've outlined the three main factors to be identified in the development of formal Hellenistic
allegory: the impact of Alexander, Homer, and Plato on the Greek mind. Alexander destroyed
Classical Greece, opened the intellectual floodgates to foreign influence which seemed to make
Greek traditions ridiculous, and founded a city where his successors gathered textual critics
together; Homer was both ubiquitously revered but also theologically problematic; whilst Plato both
savaged Homer so deeply as to require a cogent response from those who wished to retain the Poet,
whilst also permanently legitimising hyponoia as a serious philosophical form. A synthesis was
needed – to retain both Homer and Plato in the post-Alexander world required intellectual skill and
creative energy. One of the syntheses offered up, drawing upon the hyponoia of the past, was what
became allegoria. There were other syntheses offered which sought, at some level, to retain Homer
within the framework of a post-Socratic world – but it was allegory which held the field in Late
Antiquity, and this was in no small part due to the subject of my Brief Suggestive Postscript.

For Jewish and Christian interpreters, the figure of Homer is replaced – whilst his influence upon
the development of allegory is still vital, he is replaced in his role as writer of scripture by Moses.
For Pseudo-Aristeas, Aristobulus, and Philo, the object of their allegory is the Pentateuch – and the
type of Scripture this was altered the style of their interpretation. As Dawson puts it, “Rather than
attempting to edit old classics for a new age, they were seeking to interpret the new age in light of
their own old classic”28. They were deeply influenced by Plato, whose semi-dualist cosmology was
perhaps more sympathetic to Jewish beliefs than Stoic pantheism. This analysis generally holds true
for Christian allegorists, too – but just as the Hebrew scriptures book-end one side of their own age,
so does Jesus Christ book-end the other.

Bibliography
APS = Freeman, K. (translator). Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1971.
GLP = West, M.L. (translator). Greek Lyric Poetry Oxford: OUP, 1994.

Anonymous.
The Letter of Aristeas.
Aristotle.
Metaphysics.
Eusebius
Herodotus.
Histories.
Homer.
Iliad.
Odyssey.
Plato.
Ion.
Republic.

27 Plato, Republic, VII.

28 Dawson, Allegorical Readers, 75.
*Braunschweig, J. and D. Sedley. “Hellenistic philosophy”. The Cambridge Companion to Greek
and Roman Philosophy, edited by D. Sedley. Cambridge: CUP, 2003: pp151-183.
*Dawson, J.D. Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria. Berkeley, Ca.:
University of California Press, 1992.
*Lamberton, R. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the
Epic Tradition. Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1986
*Obbink, D. “Early Greek allegory”. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory edited by Rita
Copeland and Peter T. Struck. Cambridge: CUP, 2010: pp15-25.
*Small, Stuart G.P. “On Allegory in Homer”. The Classical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 7 (Apr., 1949):
423-430.
*Tate, J. “The Beginnings of Greek Allegory”. The Classical Review, Vol. 41, No. 6 (Dec., 1927):
pp214-215.