The Web of Athenaeus by Christian Jacob–New in the Hellenic Studies Series

The Web of Athenaeus
by Christian Jacob
Translated by Arietta Papaconstantinou
Edited by Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
ISBN 9780674073289
The Center for Hellenic Studies is pleased to announce the publication of The Web of Athenaeus by Christian Jacob. 
In The Web of Athenaeus, Christian Jacob produces a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus’s Sophists at Dinner (ca. 200 CE). Jacob provides the reader with a map and a compass to navigate the unfathomable number of intersecting paths in this enormous work: the books, the quotations, the diners, the dishes served, and—above all—the wordplay, all within the simulacrum of an ancient Greek library. A text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets, the Sophists at Dinner has now received a full literary re-imagining by Jacob, who connects the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans. The Web of Athenaeus simultaneously offers a literary history of the rarest and finest of Greek culture along with a creative anthropology of a Roman imperial world obsessed with the Greek past.
Christian Jacob is currently directeur d’études à l’EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) – Paris, directeur de recherche au CNRS, and a Faculty Member at UMR Anhima (Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques).

Scholars interested in this work might also be interested in “Reading Greek Poetry Aloud: Evidence from the Bacchylides Papyri,” “Performance and Text in Ancient Greece” and “The Library of Pergamon as a Classical Model” by Gregory Nagy and A Guide to Greek Traditions and Customs in America by Marilyn Rouvelas–all freely available online via the Center for Hellenic Studies website.

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