For Socrates, the text read was nothing but its words, in which sign and meaning overlapped with bewildering precision. Interpretation, exegesis, gloss, commentary, association, refutation, symbolic and allegorical senses, all rose not from the text itself but from the reader. The text, like a painted picture, said only “the moon of Athens”; it was the reader who furnished it with a full ivory face, a deep dark sky, a landscape of ancient ruins along which Socrates once walked.
