Tzvetan Todorov's approach to symbols is historical rather than theoretical, providing a survey of the interpretations of this concept to be found in the writings of authors as various as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, St. Augustine, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Novalis, Moritz, the brothers Schlegel, Freud and Jakobson. With a wealth of penetrating individual analyses the author traces a line of development in the history of ideas that ranges from Classical Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment and from Romanticism to the present.