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(More customer reviews)This book must be read by philosophers, students of the classics, literary theorists, and philologists. It was one of my favorite books that I read in 2007. The scholarship in this book is thorough and exhaustive, you can tell that Struck spent hours each day pouring over the source materials for this treatise. The book is an indepth treatment of the importance of allegorists and their use of metaphor and symbolism in their writings on myth, philosophy, and mystery religions.
Struck's book shows the difference between the writing approach of Aristotle and his followers and that of writers from the presocratics to the neoplatonists, who were more concerned with the use of symbolism in their own writings and exegesis in interpreting the writers who came before them.
Struck explains the radical change in interpretation of ancient writers by the analytical exegesis started by Aristotle. Struck goes to great lengths to show that the philosophers and poets before Aristotle were into and heavily used the allegorical and the metaphorical in their writings. When Aristotle categorized the types of writing before him by bifurcating the poetical from the analytical, he split the exegesis of philosophers, specifically the presocratics, into two camps: those who followed Aristotle's analytical style of writing and understanding of texts and those who Struck refers to as the allegorists.
Struck rallies and impressive amount of study into the surprising extent of how many allegorical writers there actually were; including philosopher poets, who existed during the Archaic period of Greece, the Classical period, and well into the Roman empire. He dispels the belief, which he thinks to be too pervasive in contemporary scholarship, that the use of the symbol, metaphor, and allegory in the understanding and writing of texts in the scholarly milieu of Greece was marginal and representative of a minority at best. He cites evidence upon evidence in favor of his thesis by delving into such writers as the commentator of the Derveni Papyrus, the presocratics, and the neoplatonists and others, including Iamblichus, Proclus, Plotinus, Chrysippus and too many more to mention. Struck solidifies his case, as to the early and extensive use of the symbol, by giving a chronological study of the philological birth and growth of the actual word "symbol", how it was first used, who used it, in what context was it used and in what way did writers understand a symbol to be.
This book is intense, in the amount of scholarship it includes and in the way Struck writes about his evidence. Despite his indepth look into the writings and philosophy of the allegorists, Struck's prose is never heavy handed like you would expect a work like this to be. The details, rigorous analysis of different allegorists, and presentation of evidence in his favor are not a hindrance to reading the book, that is, you never get bogged down in the reading. It will take you a week to read it, but only because the material is so laden with insight that you find yourself putting down the book in order to think about what you just read. Struck's prose is extremely lucid and enjoyable for being a work of scholarship (never boring). In fact, the book reads as almost a mystery novel and what a mystery he spins for the reader!
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Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic "symbol."
The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. "They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative," he writes, "with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages."
Birth of the Symbol offers a new understanding of the role of poetry in the life of ideas in ancient Greece. Moreover, it demonstrates a connection between the way we understand poetry and the way it was understood by important thinkers in ancient times.
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