Chapter 14. Words and Things The mental gymnastics of the deipnosophists are not only a mechanism that produces and combines quotations indefinitely. Despite its playful character, it is not an end in itself. It plays an instrumental role in the constitution and the enrichment of a field of knowledge and, more generally, in a project that is at the same time social, ethical, and intellectual: through the… Read more
Chapter 15. The Deipnosophists as a Text: Genesis, Uses In this strange path that associates banquets, a library, lexica, and insatiable scholars, we now need to ask what was the aim of the game. Is Athenaeus perhaps the victim of the most severe Alexandrine syndrome, that of a compilation mechanism destined to go indefinitely round in circles? Are the dialogue and its setup then nothing more than… Read more
Chapter 12. Libraries and Bibliophiles The mention of Larensius’ rich library at the beginning of Book I does not fill out the portrait of the host of the banquets, a rich Roman bibliophile and philhellene. The library also plays an essential role in Athenaeus’ work. The link that unites text, banquets, and library is a link of analogy, of condensation, of mirroring, and of structural homology. Read more
Chapter 13. Scholars’ Practices The bibliographical knowledge of Athenaeus and his characters is of a cartographical nature; it organizes a space, subdivides it, and proposes different points of view, which lead from the literary genre to the text and to the quotation, or vice versa. This shift in the hierarchy between container and contained corresponds to a change of scale and to specific forms of articulation: the… Read more
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
