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.
- ISBN10 0674073282
- ISBN13 9780674073289
- Publish Date 22 May 2013
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies
- Format Paperback
- Pages 150
- Language English