Saints and Symposiasts
The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture
1st Edition
Published on 12. September 2012
430 pages
978-1-139-55790-0 (ISBN)
Description
Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, eccentric types of eating and drinking in Greco-Roman and early Christian prose narrative texts, focusing especially on the Letters of Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, especially Apuleius, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to matter: these works communicated distinctive ideas about how to talk and how to think, distinctive models of the relationship between past and present, distinctive and often destabilising visions of identity and holiness.
Reviews / Votes
'This valuable work brings together the Greco-Roman symposium, the literary forms that engaged with it, early Christian engagements and Christian debate in later antiquity over reuses of pagan forms or rejection of earlier luxurious ways. This excellent volume sets the 'social knowledge' of Athenaeus and Plutarch (matched with the inscriptions of the Greek cities of Asia Minor) against the purity and separateness of some early Christian thought; it richly explores 'talking with the dead' in pagan and Christian contexts (the great Greek past of Plato and Aristotle in Galen and Tertullian). Unmissable.' John Wilkins, The Journal of Roman StudiesMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Cambridge University Press
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Printed music items; 9 Halftones, black and white
File size
5342,09 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-139-55790-0 (9781139557900)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Jason Koenig
Saints and Symposiasts
The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture
Book
08/2012
Cambridge University Press
€135.40
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Jason Koenig is a Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Greek Literature in the Roman Empire (2009). He has also edited Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (with Tim Whitmarsh, Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Greek Athletics (2010).
Content
Part I. Conversation and Community: 1. Locating the symposium; 2. Voice and community in sympotic literature; 3. Plutarch; 4. Athenaeus; 5. Early Christian commensality and the literary symposium; 6. Methodius; 7. Sympotic culture and sympotic literature in Late Antiquity; 8. Macrobius; Part II. Consumption and Transgression: 9. Philosophers and parasites; 10. Food and the symposium in the Greek and Latin novels; 11. Food and fasting in the Apocryphal Acts; 12. Food and fasting in early Christian hagiography; Conclusion.
