Publications

Publication details [#19627831]

De Luca, Ludovica and Angela Longo. 2021. Similitudini, metafore e allegoria nel De opificio mundi di Filone di Alessandria. Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. xxvi-246 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
Italian
Keywords
ISBN
9788893595827

Abstract

Originating from the international conference held in L'Aquila, Italy, on Oct. 24-25, 2019, this volume analyzes the philosophical images found in De opificio mundi by Philo of Alexandria (1st century B.C.-1st century A.D.) and hosts essays by some of the most renowned experts on Philo's thought. In his cosmological work par excellence, Philo, a Jewish thinker of the late Hellenistic age living between Alexandria and Rome, constructs an elaborate system of metaphors and similes: they transcend rhetorical artifice and have a specific philosophical significance to be contextualized in the original Philo's assimilation in a Jewish key of the Platonic and Stoic traditions. Particular attention is paid to the role of allegory, which, in a non- allegorical work such as the De opificio, finds a marginal but significant space, being present precisely where the link with the Judaic tradition is inescapable. In Philo's "factory" of the world, similes, metaphors and simple examples become a tool with high communicative power that he elaborates to connect two worlds, the Jewish and the Greco-Roman, in order to find a new form of common coexistence.