This PhD thesis discusses the concept of allegory from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. In the first chapter, which discusses the hermeneutics of allegorical reading in the late Archaic and Classical periods, I aim to show that previous discussions have misunderstood both the texts which allegorical readers interpreted and the interpretative claims which these readers made about them. Allegorical readers did not seek to “decode” the hidden meaning of these narratives; they sought to bring to light the pre-philosophical intuitions about the cosmos which are plausibly embedded in them.

The second chapter discusses allegorical interpretation in the context of Archaic and Classical thought. Previous approaches have characterised allegoresis either as a mode of literary criticism or as an attempt to maintain the prestige of texts such as Homer’s Iliad in a culture with whose values and ideas they were no longer consistent. My discussion highlights the difficulties inherent in both views and stresses instead the close connections between allegoresis and early Greek philosophical thought.

The third chapter is framed as a study of Hellenistic allegoresis, self-consciously challenging the typical rubric of “Stoic allegoresis”. In contrast with previous studies, I argue that allegoresis did not have a clearly defined role in the Stoic philosophical system; the early Stoics’ interest in allegory does have connections with the Stoics’ philosophical views, but it is better analysed in relation to developments in Hellenistic literary culture.

The implications of this argument – and of the thesis as a whole – are that philosophical inquiry, literary criticism and anthropology, while partially differentiated, are nevertheless thoroughly integrated in Greek culture in these periods. The history of allegoresis is thus crucial to the formation of the disciplinary categories we use today.