Modern readers and modern critics have usually a certain dislike to Allegory, at least when she presents herself honestly and by her own name. Her government has no doubt at times been something despotic, and her votaries and partisans have at times been almost intolerably tedious and absurd. Yet in the finer sorts of literature, at any rate, the apprehension of some sort of allegory, of some sort of double meaning, is almost a necessity. The student of any kind of poetry, and the student of the more imaginative prose, can never rest satisfied with the mere literal and grammatical sense, which belongs not to literature but to science. He cannot help seeking some hidden meaning, something further, something behind, if it be only rhythmical beauty, only the suggestion of pleasure to the ear and eye and heart. Nor ought he to help it. But the ill repute of Allegory arises from the ease with which her aid is borrowed to foist religious, philosophical, and other sermons into the paradise of art. This danger was especially imminent in a country like Greece, where religion, philosophy, literature, and art of all kinds were, from the earliest times, almost inextricably connected and blended. Accordingly allegory, and that reverse or seamy side of allegory, rationalistic interpretation, seem to have made their appearance very early in Greece. This latter has only to do with literary criticism in the sense that it is, and always has been, a very great degrader thereof, inclining it to be busy with matter instead of form. The allegorising tendency proper is not quite so dangerous, though still dangerous enough. But in the second-hand and all too scanty notices that we have of the early philosophers, it is evident that the two tendencies met and crossed in them almost bewilderingly. When Xenophanes found fault with the Homeric anthropomorphism, when Anaxagoras and others made the scarcely audacious identification of the arrows of Apollo with the rays of the sun, and the bolder one of Penelope’s web with the processes of the syllogism, they were anticipating a great deal which has presented itself as criticism (whether it had any business to do so or not) in the last two thousand and odd hundred years. We have not a few names, given by more or less good authority and less or more known independently, of persons—Anaximander, Stesimbrotus, a certain Glaucus or Glaucon, and others—who early devoted themselves to allegorical interpretation of Homer and perhaps of other poets; but we have hardly even fragments of their work, and we can found no solid arguments upon what is told us of it. Only we can see dimly from these notices, clearly from the fuller and now trustworthy evidence which we find in Plato, that their criticism was criticism of matter only,—that they treated Homer as a historical, a religious, a philosophical document, not as a work of art.