Deep Surfaces and Surficial Depths: Ancient Literary Criticism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Meandering its way from Philodemus’s On Poems through to the writings of the Byzantine scholars Cometas and Leo the Philosopher, this article attempts to outline and identify the use of metaphors of “surface” and “depth” as they apply to texts in ancient literary criticism and compare such instances with their use today. In doing so, the hope is to weaponize classical texts to provide a means to think beyond “suspicious” hermeneutic approaches to literature, and to demonstrate the pitfalls of more recent attempts by literary scholars to do just this.