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The Deipnosophistae (deipnon “dinner” and sophistai, “professors”: original Greek title Deipnosophistai, English Deipnosophists) may be translated as The Banquet of the Learned or Philosophers at Dinner or The Gastronomers.

The Deipnosophists is a long work of literary and antiquarian research by the ancient Greek author Athenaeus of Naucratis in Egypt, written in Rome in the early second century CE. The protagonist is Ulpian, the host of a leisurely banquet whose main purpose is literary, historical and antiquarian conversation. Characters include grammarians, lexicographers, jurists, musicians and hangers-on.

Contents

The Deipnosophistae professes to be an account given by the author to his friend Timocrates of a banquet held at the house of Laurentius (or Larentius), a scholar and wealthy patron of art. It is thus a dialogue within a dialogue, after the manner of SPlato, but a conversation of sufficient length to occupy several days (though represented as taking place in one) Among the twenty-nine guests are See also: Galen and Ulpian, but they are all probably fictitious personages, and the majority take no part in the conversation. If Ulpian is identical with the famous jurist, the Deipnosophistae must have been written after his death in 228; but the jurist was murdered by the praetorian guards, whereas Ulpian in Athenaeus dies a natural death.

The work is invaluable for providing fictionalized information about the Hellenistic literary world of the leisured class during the Roman Empire.

To the majority of modern readers, even more useful is the wealth of information provided in the Deipnosophists about earlier Greek literature. In the course of discussing classic authors, the participants make quotations, long and short, from the works of about 700 earlier Greek authors and 2,500 separate writings, many of them otherwise unrecorded. Food and wine, luxury, music, sexual mores, literary gossip and philology are among the major topics of discussion.

Recipes

The text is amoung our chief sources for information on cooking recipes in Antiquity, preserving, for example, the original Doric text of a recipe from the lost cookbook by Mithaecus, considered the world's oldest preserved authored recipe, in translation:

Tainia: gut, discard the head, rinse and fillet; add cheese and olive oil.

The laconic recipe gives instruction to prepare the tainia fish (Cepola rubescens). The addition of chees seems to have been a controversial matter, since Archestratus is quoted as warning his readers of Syracusans spoiling every good fish by adding cheese to everything.

Homosexuality

In addition to its main focuses, the text offers an unusually clear portrait of pederasty in late Hellenism. Book XIII holds a wealth of information for studies of homosexuality in Roman Greece. The subject is discussed without restraint; many famous boy-lovers are mentioned, including Alcibiades, Charmides, Autolycus, Pausanias and Sophocles. Furthermore, numerous books and plays on the subject are mentioned, including The Pederasts by Diphilus, Ganymede, On Love by Heraclides of Pontus, The Effeminates by Cratinus, with sidelights on Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Survival and reception

The Deipnosophists was originally in 15 books. The work survives in one manuscript from which the whole of books 1 and 2, and some other pages too, disappeared long ago. An Epitome or abridgment was made in medieval times, and survives complete: from this it is possible to read the missing sections, though in a disjointed form.

The encyclopaedist Sir Thomas Browne wrote a short essay on Athenaeus which reflects a revived interest in the Banquet of the Learned amongst scholars following the publication of the Deipnosophistae in 1612 by the Classical scholar Isaac Casaubon. Browne wrote of it:

Would that a little part survived of the writers from whom Athenaeus quotes, scattered here and there, notable, startling or amusing sayings, and whets the appetite of his eager reader..... Mimes, fools, parasites, lute-girls are bearable and not inappropriate amusement for a drinking party. There is a most amusing story in Athenaeus about the boys in the inn at Agrigentum. They are so mad with drink that they think they are sailing in a ship tossed about by a wild storm. To lighten the ship they throw out all the carpets and crockery, call the police 'mermen', offer rewards for their rescue to those who reproach them, and do not even return to their senses when the onlookers take their things.

In the Victorian era a critic characterizeded the Deipnosophists and its author thus:

the somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker like Athenaeus is turned to gold by time.

Modern readers question whether the Deipnosophists genuinely evokes a literary symposium of learned disquisitions on a range of subjects suitable for such an occasion, or whether it has a satirical edge, rehashing the cultural clichés of the urbane literati of its day.

References

• Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists ed. and tr. C. B. Gulick. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927-41. 7 vols.
• Athenaeus and his world: reading Greek culture in the Roman Empire ed. David Braund, John Wilkins. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
• Food in antiquity ed. John Wilkins, David Harvey, Mike Dobson. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1995.
• Andrew Dalby, Siren feasts: a history of food and gastronomy in Greece (London: Routledge, 1996) especially pp. 168-180.
• Johansson, Warren. 'Athenaeus' in Encyclopedia of Homosexuality ed. Wayne R. Dynes (Garland Publishing, 1990) p. 87.

External links

• The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus presented online by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center
• Thomas Browne, From a reading of Athenaeus, British Museum Sloane MS no. 1827 (wikisource)
• Extracts from book 12 of the Deipnosophists concerning homosexuality
• Extracts from book 13 of the Deipnosophists
• on-line version of the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality article referenced above

• Ancient Greek works