Abstract

This dissertation offers a new history of allegorical interpretation as an expression of Greek religious rationality, as well as an examination of similarities in the reception of this history by Plato and Lucretius. ;Allegorical interpretation has its origins in the conventions of traditional mythical poetry and the inductive character of Greek religious thought. Hindering perception of this is the assumption that allegory is the result of a crisis in Greek theology occasioned by the rise of a new scientific rationality. However, all of the elements of allegorical interpretation are already present in archaic poetry, and above all a consciousness that anthropomorphic language about the gods is symbolic, and identification of gods with natural and psychological forces. The pre-Platonic history of allegory culminates in the Derveni Papyrus, in which it is clear that allegory is a part of a single enterprise with theology, religion, and cosmology. ;The dissertation argues that Plato is not simply opposed to allegorical interpretation of myth, but that his reaction to it is essentially ambivalent. On the one hand, his epistemology is fundamentally anti authoritarian, insofar as nothing that one receives from an authority is considered ipso facto authoritative, so that the intellectual and moral authority of the mythical tradition carries little weight with him, and using allegory as a technique to understand myth would be in vain. On the other hand, he recognizes and uses myth's power to communicate what cannot be known, and also to illustrate what one comes to know through the conversion of one's soul to the philosophical ascent. ;Lucretius shares Plato's ambivalence. There is a deep underlying sympathy between the two philosophers, through a diametric and explicit opposition of the latter's materialist Epicureanism to the former's idealism, in their criticism of the mythical-religious tradition's claims to authority. We shall see that Lucretius tries to do Plato one better, to turn Plato against Plato, by becoming the very poet whom Plato's Socrates would be compelled by his argument to allow into his mythical city, and allegory is integral to this project.