Personification

Abstract This chapter examines the trope of personification and the poetics of prosopopoeia in Pater’s writings about Greek myth and religion, particularly in the essay ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ (1876). This is then placed in relation to his thinking about personhood in later works, firstly in the idea of a companionable divine logos in Marius the Epicurean (1885), and later in the theory of Platonic Universals expounded in Plato and Platonism (1893). I consider Pater’s dialogue with the writings of Arnold and Ruskin on personification, and the daring ways in which Pater’s mythopoeism went further than anyone else in the nineteenth century. I explore the significance of ‘caprice’—the undulancy or wavering inherent to all human relations—as a fundamental corollary of Pater’s religious and metaphysical vision of personification and prosopopoeia.