
The Web of Athenaeus
Christian Jacob(Author)
Scott Fitzgerald Johnson(Editor)
Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies (Publisher)
Published on 27. May 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
150 pages
978-0-674-07328-9 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
Jacob surveys Athenaeus's characters and themes; the role of libraries and Athenaeus's relation to the past; the intersection of Greek symposium with Roman dinner party; how people read; why they were so passionate about words, many of them obsolete or arcane; what such a work might have meant to the original readership; and how the whole farrago hangs together... The book is a welcome introduction to a type of literature that has had a great influence. -- D. Konstan * Choice *More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
1 line illustration
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
249 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-674-07328-9 (9780674073289)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Christian Jacob is a Faculty Member, Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Arietta Papaconstantinou is a Reader in Ancient History in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Postclassical and Byzantine Greek in the Classics Department at Georgetown University.