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Revision as of 21:47, 14 March 2006 by Andrew Dalby (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)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. It 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 in which food and wine, luxury, music, sexual mores, literary gossip and philology, amongst other topics are discussed, with wide-ranging quotes and literary allusions. Characters include a handful of grammarians, lexicographers, jurists, musicians and hangers-on. The work is invaluable for providing much information about the Hellenistic literary world of the leisured class during the Roman Empire and for including extracts from the works of about 700 earlier Greek authors, many of them otherwise unrecorded.
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 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.
External links
- Full version of this essay
- [http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/athenaeus13.html Extracts from book 12 of the Deipnosophists concerning homosexuality
- [http://members.aol.com/heliogabby/deipnon/deipnon.htm Extracts from book 13 of the Deipnosophists
- The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus: Presented online by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.