Homer the Theologian

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.

I. Art and Ceremony in Late Antiquity
by Sabine G. MacCormack
II. Synesius of Cyrene: Philosopher-Bishop
by Jay Bregman
III. Theodosian Empresses: Women and Imperial Dominion in Late Antiquity
by Kenneth G. Holum
IV. John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century
by Robert L. Wilken
V. Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man
by Patricia Cox
VI. Pachomius: The Making of a Community In Fourth-Century Egypt
by Philip Rousseau
VII. Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries
by A. P. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein
VIII. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul
by Raymond Van Dam
IX. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition
by Robert Lamberton
X. Procopius and the Sixth Century
by Averil Cameron
XI. Guardians of the Language:The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity
by R. A. Kaster