Allegorical interpretations of Plato  

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Many Plato interpreters held that his writings contain passages with double meanings, called ‘allegories’ or ‘symbols,’ that give the dialogues layers of figurative meaning in addition to their usual literal meaning. These allegorical interpretations of Plato were dominant for more than fifteen hundred years, from about the first century CE through the Renaissance and into the Eighteenth Century, and were advocated by major figures such as Plotinus, Proclus, and Ficino. Beginning with Philo of Alexandria (1st c. CE), these views influenced Jewish, Christian and Islamic interpretation of their holy scriptures. They spread widely in the Renaissance and contributed to the fashion for allegory among poets such as Dante, Spenser, and Shakespeare.

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,' 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 Neo-Platonism, and the tradition of reading Plato allegorically is now an area of active research.

The definitions of 'allegory,' 'symbolism,' and 'figurative meaning' evolved over time. The word '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. Today, allegory is often said to be a sustained sequence of metaphors within a literary work, but this was not clearly the ancient definition since then a single passage or even a name could be allegorical. Generally, the changing meanings of such terms must be studied within each historical context.

Renewed Dominance of the Allegorical Plato in the Renaissance: Ficino

Though almost all of Plato's dialogues were unavailable in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, Neo-Platonism and its allegorical philosophy became well-known through various channels:

All mediaeval thought up to the twelfth century was Neoplatonic rather than Aristotelian; and such popular authors of the Middle Ages as Augustine, Boethius, and the Pseudo-Dionysius carried Christian Neoplatonism to England as they did to all other parts of Western Europe.

From the Twelfth Century, the works of Aristotle became increasingly available and his philosophy came to dominate late medieval Scholasticism.

Plato's dialogues were preserved in the Byzantine Empire and Latin translations of individual dialogues began to appear in Italy early in the Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino (1433 – 1499) published the first complete translation in 1484 and this rapidly spread direct knowledge of Plato throughout Western Europe:

Their publication ... was an intellectual event of the first magnitude since they established Plato as a newly discovered authority for the Renaissance who could now take precedence over Aristotle, and who's work ... was of sufficient profundity to be set above his rival's.

Ficino's translations helped make Renaissance Platonism into 'an attacking progressive force besieging the conservative cultural fortress which defended the Aristotelianism of the Schoolmen ... the firmest support of the established order.'

Ficino's commentaries and translations ensured that the Neo-Platonist, allegorical approach to Plato became the norm throughout Western Europe. Ficino was reading Neo-Platonists such as Proclus as early as the 1460's. As Hankins said, Ficino, 'like the [neo-Platonic] allegorists believed that Plato had employed allegory as a device for hiding esoteric doctrines from the vulgar ...' His commentary on Plato's Phaedrus, for example, forthrightly interprets passages allegorically and acknowledges his debts to ancient Neo-Platonists:

The fable of the cicadas (230c) demands that we treat it as an allegory since higher things too, like poetic ones, are almost all allegorical... Thus it seemed to the Platonists, not only to [Neo-Platonists such as] Hermias but to Iamblichus too. In part, I follow in their footsteps, but in part I walk a crooked line based on probability and reason. Socrates himself, moreover, obviously feels the need for allegory here ...

Ficino’s Christian, Neoplatonic and allegorical reading of Plato 'tended to shape the accepted interpretation of these works from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.'

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