Plato and Allegorical Interpretation

Abstract

It is clear, then, that Plato's strictures on Homer ought not to have given any encouragement to allegorical interpretation. The eulogists of Homer ought to have sought other grounds for the defence which he invited them to make; while the allegorizing philosophers, if they persisted in treating interpretation of the poets as an instrument of knowledge, ought to have answered Plato not by multiplying allegories but by producing a defence of the allegorical method. The question with which we are concerned is, of course, not what ought to have been done, but what actually happened. But the foregoing considerations ought to warn us against assuming without evidence that all those who allegorized after Plato did so in order to answer his attack on the poets, and were directly incited by that attack to engage in allegorical interpretation. The fact that the early Stoics were prolific in such interpretations is in itself no proof that they intended in this way to answer Plato's criticism of the myths. Other evidence is required to prove that it was the desire to answer Plato which impelled them to wallow in allegory.