Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Transformation of the Classical Heritage)

by Robert Lamberton

Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Classics, Literary Criticism, Religion, Ancient History

385 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Jared Saltz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lamberton's study is not concerned with religious thought as such, but rather a single phase of the history of the interaction of the Homeric poems with Greek ideas concerning the nature of reality and the divine: the reading of Homer by thinkers of the Platonic tradition from the 2nd to 5th century after Christ. Therein was a double impulse toward a redefinition of the meaning of Homeric poems and the attribution of Homeric status to their own ideology. The two divergent works of Heraclitus and Ps-Plutarch provide a background against which a focused image of Homer emerges, an image articulated by dogmatic Platonists and Neo Pythagoreans. These Neoplatonic Allegorists refashioned Homer not by any interference with the text itself, but by exerting their influence on the other factor in the equation of reading: the reader. "In so doing, they predisposed subsequent readers to expect, and so to discover, a certain scope of meaning in early epics" (XI). To aid in this end, Lamberton traces how the Divine Homer provides the background for Homer's use in Neoplatonic Allegory, its development in Middle Platonism (Lamberton does not see that Philo is very original), in Plotinus and Porphyry and Julian, and then how Deliberative Allegory also interacts with the thought of Proclus. Lamberton concludes tha Allegorical interpretation has a bad reputation in our time: we imagine the Allegorists to have been guilty of willful deception in distorting the meaning of texts and imposing foreign ideas on them, compounding their crimes by appealing to the texts as authority but then foisting other ideas on them. But if we can not take seriously the claims we find in Porphyry and Proclus regarding the meaning of the Iliad and Odyssey we are left with a curious and unsatisfying model of the cultural process in questions. After all, "garbage in" did not create "garbage out" but Dante.

A must-read for those interested in the phenomenon of allegorical interpretation, the pagan exegesis of Homer, or the influence of Homeric exegesis on Christian exegesis of the Bible.

[Robert Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is lucidly written, helpful, and accomplishes what it sets out to do: trace the allegorical/(Neo)platonic interpretation of Homer from antiquity through late antiquity and even beyond into Medieval period.

[Δημήτρης · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's a really great book