14. How Binitarian/Trinitarian was Eusebius? Volker Henning Drecoll The Trinitarian theology of Eusebius is one of the crucial problems of the history of theology of the fourth century. It is often assumed that Eusebius’ theology is a kind of standard theology, which was shared by many Eastern bishops in the fourth century. The Creeds of Antioch (especially the so-called second Formula of Antioch) seem to be… Read more
15. Origen, Eusebius, the Doctrine of Apokatastasis, and Its Relation to Christology Ilaria Ramelli In Origen’s thought, the doctrine of apokatastasis is interwoven with his anthropology, eschatology, theology, philosophy of history, theodicy, and exegesis; for anyone who takes Origen’s thought seriously and with a deep grasp of it, it is impossible to separate the apokatastasis theory from all the rest, so as to reject it but… Read more
16. Eusebius and Lactantius: Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Christian Theology [1] Kristina A. Meinking Philosophers and theologians of antiquity had long held that the supreme god was impassible and thus not subject to emotions. In his De ira Dei, however, Lactantius argues that the Christian God does have emotions and that anger, in particular, is critical to the divine nature. My aim… Read more
Afterword. Receptions Jeremy M. Schott Late-ancient and Byzantine Receptions In most respects, Eusebius’ biography is lost to historians. His successor, Acacius, penned a hagiographical Life that has not survived. [1] Eusebius, for his part, authored a Life of his mentor, Pamphilus, in which we might guess that he provided some autobiographical material, but this text has also been lost. Read more
Foreword Why should anyone bother reading Athenaeus today? Among the extant corpus of Greek texts, the Deipnosophists is a paradoxical work, such a long and undigested text, with a confusing structure, a text mainly composed of fragments of other texts, of quotations from a lost a library. Athenaeus, like some other polymaths, scholiasts, or lexicographers, is one of those archivists and transmitters of ancient scholarship, providing contemporary… Read more
Chapter 1. On the Art of Planting Cabbage On opening the Deipnosophists randomly, the reader could chance upon the following passage (1.34c): “That the Egyptians like wine is also proven by the fact that only there as a custom during meals, before all foods, still today they serve boiled cabbage.” Curious, he will continue reading: “And many add cabbage seeds to the foods prepared against… Read more
Chapter 2. Banquet, Symposium, Library Every reader of Athenaeus, from the very first lines of his work, experiences a perverted Ariadne’s thread: by following it, one does not come out of the labyrinth; rather, one progressively penetrates it, one gets lost in its details, losing sight of the overall plan, the architect’s project, the structure and purpose of the work. Besides, such is the temptation of every… Read more
Chapter 3. “Athenaeus is the Father of this Book” What was Athenaeus’ project? Why did he not stop at the stage of compilation, which would have allowed him to possess a collection of excerpts from a wide range of books, or to write a monograph on the pleasures of the table, perhaps even a glossary of the rare words of culinary art? To what end… Read more
Chapter 4. Banquet and Sumposion The symposium (sumposion) was an essential moment in the social life of ancient Greece. A circle of friends gathered to enjoy the pleasures of wine, generally after having shared those of the table (deipnon), the two being distinct moments. [1] The time of the symposium is when the guests experience wine, a beverage linked… Read more
Chapter 5. Simile Space and Narrative Space In the Iliad, place is most often delineated within the context of the Homeric similes, rather than in narrative. [1] Previous scholarship has emphasized two distinct but equally important aspects of Iliadic Gleichnisorte (“simile spaces”): their use as a way of making intratextual references, and their function within the wider framework of the epic’s plot. Read more
