Symbolism

It is difficult for me to buy into Richard Lattimore's claim that "symbolism and allegory seem foreign to the biology of early Greek epic." (p. 15) Turning a bunch of lonely, wandering sailors into swine? It doesn't seem that one can get more symbolic than that.

But Lattimore is the expert, and I don't think I, with my casual reading of the great tragedies as experience, am going to begin questioning him. Instead, I'll try to stick to the surface plot of the poem.