The Web of Athenaeus - Paperback

by Christian Jacob (Author), Arietta Papaconstantinou (Translator), Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Christian Jacob is on the Faculty of the Departement d'Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques at L'ecole des Hautes etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.