Content area
Full Text
(Proquest Information and Learning: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)
1
Diogenes 2.11 (DK 61 A2):
Favorinus says in his Miscellaneous History that [Anaxagoras] was the first to show that the poetry of Homer is about virtue and justice, and that his acquaintance Metrodorus of Lampsacus defended this principle more extensively and was the first to study the poet's physical doctrine.1
Tatian ad Graecos 21 (DK 61 A3):
And Metrodorus of Lampsacus, in his treatise About Homer, reasoning very foolishly, turns everything into allegory. For neither Hera nor Athena nor Zeus are that which people think they are when they establish the sacred precincts, but are the substances of nature and arrangements of the elements. And clearly Hector and Achilles and Agamemnon and all the Greeks in general and the barbarians, too, and Helen and Paris partake of the same nature, and, for the sake of the economy of the poem, they are introduced despite the fact that none of the aforementioned heroes actually exists.
Hesychius (DK 61 A4), Philodemus:2
HESYCHIUS: Metrodorus says allegorically that Agamemnon is the aether.
PHILODEMUS: But some are plainly mad, like those who say that the two poems of Homer were composed about the elements of the universe and about the laws and customs among men, and that Agamemnon is the aether, Achilles the sun, Helen the earth, and Alexandros the air, Hector the moon, and analogously with the names of all the others. And of the gods, Demeter is the liver, Dionysius the spleen, and Apollo the bile.
Plato Ion 5300 (DK 61 Al):
ION: And I think that I talk about Homer better than other men, for neither Metrodorus of Lampsacus nor Stesimbrotus of Thasos nor Glaucon (nor anyone else ever) has spoken so many and such excellent thoughts about Homer as I have.
2
Oddly enough, the renewed interest in ancient literary criticism has not yet extended in any serious way to Metrodorus of Lampsacus, a fifth-- century allegorical interpreter of Homer and disciple of Anaxagoras. While Metrodorus has received a few passing comments during the last decade (notably Lamberton and Keaney 1992), and while he earned three full pages in Nicholas Richardson's landmark essay on "Homeric Professors in the Age of the Sophists" (1975.68-70), and four...