The Workshop on Late Antiquity and Byzantium is pleased to announce its next meeting.
David Orsbon, PhD student in Comparative Literature, will present “A Twelfth-Century Byzantine Interpretation of Heliodoros’ Aithiopika: A Systematic Study of Philip the Philosopher’s Essay on the ‘Modest Charikleia’. Please find an abstract below.
Join us on Tuesday, 22 April at 4:30pm in Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 156. CWAC is located just north of Regenstein Library at 5540 S. Greenwood Ave.
Persons in need of assistance, please contact Jeremy Thompson (jcthompson@uchicago.edu).
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Almost entirely neglected by contemporary literary scholarship, Philip Philagathos’ twelfth-century allegorical interpretation, which models itself after the Platonic dialogues, of Heliodoros’ third-century, Greek novel, the Aithiopika, can lay a credible claim to be the earliest surviving critical essay dedicated to the explication of a work of prose fiction in its entirety. The present essay aims to fill in this lacuna by providing the first comprehensive study of Philip’s Interpretation, complemented by a new translation of the text. But in addition to offering a more or less complete account of Philip’s Interpretation, this essay will also consider the larger implications of Philip’s Interpretation for contemporary scholarship. In the first place, Philip’s understudied Interpretation promises to augment our understanding of the reception and interpretation of Heliodoros’ novel. Moreover, Philip’s Interpretation showcases the interpretive possibilities of neo-Platonic allegoresis, which, Philip implies, possesses the remarkable power to unlock an entirely new, philosophical register of the Aithiopika in which this novel becomes immediately relevant to any reader who believes in and has concern for the final destination of her or his soul. Finally, and of particular interest to contemporary scholars of literary criticism, Philip’s Interpretation offers a substantive and suggestive response to an enduring question among literary theorists and critics: what relationship, if any, should there be between the text under investigation and the interpretive methodology that one applies to it?