This chapter defines a figurative reading and shows what forms such readings took for Greeks and Romans. It reviews early specimens of Christian artifice. The distinction between typology and allegory was never more than embryonic in early Christian writers. Figurative reading of canonical texts has a history in Greek and Latin before the birth of Christ. In the voluminous works of Philo of Alexandria, a Greek-speaking Jew who was intermittently conscious of the Hebrew behind the Septuagint, one can see a confluence of the Jewish and the classical traditions. Origen appears to commend a figurative reading of a passage from the Gospels in Numenius, a philosopher who was the first to offer a Platonic interpretation of Greek myths. All allegorical reading in the early church is governed by the axiom that Christ is at once the universal interpreter and the universal subject of the scriptures.