Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (review)

This book offers a remarkably comprehensive study of ancient symbolic interpretation from the Pre-Socratics to the later Neoplatonists and beyond. Struck's main argument is that over the span of a millennium, there is a recognizable mode of poetic interpretation defined not by the formal and rhetorical criteria propounded by Aristotle, but by the view that texts contain an inherent surplus of meaning that surpasses the limits of what they say. Struck gives us a history of these nonmimetic theories of representation and of nonrepresentational symbols. It is a history that has not been written until now because of the predominant place given by ancient critics and modern historians of ancient criticism to the mimetic theories of Plato and Aristotle. But Struck systematically recovers a tradition of interpretation without which the mimetic theories of Plato and Aristotle would not have been possible.

The first chapter traces the archaic and classical tradition of interpreting epic poetry as "enigmatic," which is expressed mainly through the usage of terms from the etymological family ainos, ainigma, ainissesthai. Struck argues that the glimpses of allegorical interpretation that we find in Theagenes of Rhegium, Pherecydes of Syros, Metrodorus of Lampascus, and the Derveni papyrus commentator reflect a tradition of contesting the surface meaning of epic (including Orphic poetry) in search of more profound hidden meanings entangled in riddles. In contrast, Aristotle advocates criteria for poetry that explicitly avoid the "enigmatic" (Poetics 1458a18–26), and denies to poetic texts the possibility of any deeper religious or allegorical meaning. For Struck, it is not a question of whether any such meaning is really there; it is a question of the consequences after Aristotle of rejecting allegorical interpretation. I do not agree with Struck's effort to identify the allegoresis of a Theagenes or Metrodorus, who view Homeric divinities as proxies for cosmic forces, with, for example, that of the Derveni commentator, who accepts that Orpheus riddles because his message is fundamentally oracular. But he is surely correct to point to traditions of allegorical interpretation in particular as the foil for the advancement of the rhetorical school of literary criticism.

Chapters 2–7 focus on the development of the "symbolic" mode of literary interpretation, expressed primarily through the terms symbolon and later, synthêma. From its classical period sense as an authenticating token or divine sign, the symbolon takes on the specialized meaning of "password" down to the end of the fourth century for the followers of Pythagoras and for initiates in the Orphic, Dionysian, and Eleusinian mysteries. Both uses require an interpretive paradigm that inherits much from the earlier traditions of allegorical reading, especially insofar as they assume enigmatic language and hidden meanings. By the third century, when we find Chrysippus describing a literary construction for the first time as a symbolon (apud Galen, De plac. 3.8.3–5), the representational character of the symbolon has given way to an ontological one, which Struck persuasively grounds in Stoic language theory. Accordingly, the symbolon becomes a material essence that partakes through sympatheia of the divine pneuma and logos. This step is crucial for the development of Neoplatonist theories of the symbolon, which in the writings of mainly Iamblichus and Proclus reaches new heights as a manifestation of divinity itself.

For Iamblichus, the symbolon is a means by which to instantiate divinity through theurgical ritual. He describes the symbolon as a material attribute affiliated with a given divinity (e.g., a bone, gem, stone, herb, and so forth), inserted into a devotional figurine of that divinity, which is then consecrated to invoke its presence. Here Struck deals all too briefly with the common late magical practice of animating statuettes. His discussion raises some important unanswered questions, such as how widely we can extend Iamblichus' partly idiosyncratic notion of symbolon to similar ritual practices in Papyri Graeci Magicae, e.g., animating Eros figurines not otherwise associated with theurgy.

For Proclus...