Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.

Robert Lamberton is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University.

"Lamberton has written an important history that is not just literary, but also cultural and intellectual."—William G. Thalmann, Philosophy and Literature

"This is real scholarship. It is also, I submit, a far more valid version of Classical studies, and a work of far more central concern to the real meaning of any education, but particularly the Classical, than most of what passes for Classical scholarship today."—Ingrid D. Rowland, Favonius

"It is Robert Lamberton's task in this dense and closely argued book to show how. . . . Homer was to become in the hands of the Third-Century A.D. Neo-platonists Porphyry and Plotinus a wholly and quite intentionally allegorical bard, imbued with a mystical understanding of nature and of the fate of souls, and who could be quoted as authoritative evidence against Christianity in much the same way as the scriptures were quoted for it."—Peter Jones, London Times

"Extraordinarily thought-provoking for all theologicans and especially for biblical theologians, since both are concerned with inspired and normative ancient narratives."—A. T. Kraabel, Religious Studies Review