Dissertation Prize for Thesis Examining Ancient Allegory and Greek Culture

Trinity Junior Research Fellow William Winning has been awarded the Hare Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in Classics from Cambridge University.

Dr Winning’s thesis, ‘The Golden Chain: Redrawing the Map of Ancient Allegory’ is a study of allegorical interpretation in Ancient Greek culture between the late Archaic and Hellenistic periods (6th to 1st centuries BC). Allegory – or the idea that a text or artwork might have hidden as well as apparent meanings – has a long presence in Western literature, art, religious and political symbolism and as a way of reading sacred texts like the Bible. Dr Winning’s dissertation attempts to recover the concerns of the earliest ancient allegorical readers by stressing the discontinuity between their ideas and the later allegorical tradition. He focuses in particular on ancient Greek allegory of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, which saw the emergence of a distinction between literary and religious representation versus scientific, philosophical and historical knowledge on which all subsequent notions of allegory depend.

Dr Winning is currently turning his thesis into a monograph which will build on the foundations laid by his doctoral research while also expanding outwards in order to show just how central the topic of allegory was in many areas of ancient literature and thought. He is also working on a further project on the theme of ‘rationalisation’ in Archaic and Classical culture and on a social history of knowledge in the Classical period based on the Platonic corpus.

He says of winning the prize: ‘I am absolutely delighted to have won the Hare Prize 2024. Allegory is a very complex topic, with plenty of scope for losing one’s way or pursuing blind alleys, and so it’s especially reassuring to find out that my thesis has won this award.’