Allegorical interpretations of Plato

Many interpreters of Plato held that his writings contain passages with double meanings, called allegories, symbols, or myths, that give the dialogues layers of figurative meaning in addition to their usual literal meaning.^[1] These allegorical interpretations of Plato were dominant for more than fifteen hundred years, from about the 1st century CE through the Renaissance and into the 18th century, and were advocated by major Platonist philosophers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Syrianus, Proclus, and Marsilio Ficino.^[1] Beginning with Philo of Alexandria (1st c. CE), these views influenced the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic interpretation of these religions' respective sacred scriptures. They spread widely during the Renaissance and contributed to the fashion for allegory among poets such as Dante Alighieri, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.^[2]

In the early modern period, classical scholarship rejected claims that Plato was an allegorist. After this rupture, the ancient followers of Plato who read the dialogues as sustained allegories were labelled "Neo-Platonists" and regarded as an aberration. In the wake of Tate's pioneering 1929 article Plato and Allegorical Interpretation,^[3] scholars began to study the allegorical approach to Plato in its own right both as essential background to Plato studies and as an important episode in the history of philosophy, literary criticism, hermeneutics, and literary symbolism. Historians have come to reject any simple division between Platonism and Neoplatonism, and the tradition of reading Plato allegorically is now an area of active research.^[4]

The definitions of "allegory", "symbolism", and "figurative meaning" evolved over time. The term allegory (Greek for "saying other") became more frequent in the early centuries CE and referred to language that had some other meaning in addition to its usual or literal meaning. Earlier in classical Athens, it was common instead to speak of "undermeanings" (Gk., hyponoiai), which referred to hidden or deeper meanings.^[5] Today, allegory is often said to be a sustained sequence of metaphors within a literary work, but this was not the ancient definition; at the time, a single passage, or even a name, could be considered allegorical. Generally, the changing meanings of such terms must be studied within each historical context.^[6]