Allegoresis

Allegoresis is the interpretive art of reading a text — especially the myths and the poems of Homer, Hesiod, and the Orphic singers — as an allegory, a surface story veiling a deeper philosophical or theological meaning. Where a tale of the gods seemed crude or impious read literally, the allegorist found beneath it a truth about the cosmos, the soul, or the divine.

Begun by the Stoics and others to defend Homer, the method became central to the Neoplatonists: Porphyry read a Homeric cave as the descent of souls, and Proclus read the whole of myth as sacred theology. It is the engine of the Platonist reading of the poets — and the reason the tradition could revere as holy scripture the very tales Plato had once wished to censor.