How to Read Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists

Abstract

scholarly interest in the literary aspects of Athenaeus' Deipnosophists has increased greatly over the last decade, but little analysis proceeds from the perspective of the reader. This article seeks to redress that situation by showing how "readerly" engagement involving inter-and intratext renders Athenaeus' text both meaningful and pleasurable to read. I analyze the text as a dramatization of acts of reading inter-and intratextually. such reading broadly employs symbolism and symbolic language. Understanding this way of reading and its rhetoric enables modern readers to see the Deipnosophists as a literary work rather than merely a repository of knowledge.

Plutarch’s Cosmological Ethics

“…78 The cosmos is like a house (28) in which humans are received as banqueters (29). Sun and moon are the lamps (29), and the land and sea, which bring us food, are the tables (30), which are waited upon by Paulas 2012. For 78 For the comparison between life and symposium, albeit without cosmological connotations, see e.g.…”