By Jason König

Greek traditions of writing approximately foodstuff and the symposium had a protracted and wealthy afterlife within the first to 5th centuries CE, in either Greco-Roman and early Christian tradition. This booklet presents an account of the heritage of the table-talk culture, derived from Plato's Symposium and different classical texts, focusing between different writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It additionally bargains with the illustration of transgressive, degraded, eccentric sorts of consuming and ingesting in Greco-Roman and early Christian prose narrative texts, focusing specifically at the Letters of Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, specifically Apuleius, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It argues that writing approximately intake and dialog persevered to subject: those works communicated precise rules approximately easy methods to speak and the way to imagine, unique versions of the connection among earlier and current, particular and sometimes destabilising visions of id and holiness.

Show description

Read Online or Download Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture PDF

Similar ancient & medieval literature books

The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides

Ovid's Heroides, a list of letters via ladies who've been abandoned, has too often been tested as in simple terms a lament. In a brand new departure, this publication portrays the ladies of the Heroides as a group of authors. Combining shut readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with severe equipment, the e-book argues that the issues of similarity among different letters of the Heroides, so frequently derided through smooth critics, characterize a super exploitation of intratextuality, within which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously models herself as an alluding writer prompted by way of what she has learn in the Heroides.

Technopaignia Formspiele in der griechischen Dichtung (Mnemosyne Supplements)

Technopaignia is the 1st complete assortment and scholarly research of a corpus of literary phenomena whose particularity is composed within the creative play with formal positive aspects (acrostics, anagrams, palindromes and so on. ). The research either discusses every one phenomenon individually as part of the historical past of old literature and touches upon extra primary questions about the notion of language, the interplay of literary creation and reception, the relation of literary and non-literary sorts of writing, the character of paintings and so on.

Fiction on the Fringe: Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age

This choice of essays deals a entire exam of texts that usually were excluded from the most corpus of the traditional Greek novel and restricted to the margins of the style, akin to the "Life of Aesop", the "Life of Alexander the Great", and the "Acts of the Christian Martyrs".

Anthology of classical myth : primary sources in translation

This quantity is designed as a better half to the traditional undergraduate mythology textbooks or, while assigned along the vital Greek and Roman works, as a source-based replacement to these textbooks. as well as the full texts of the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod's Theogony, this assortment presents beneficiant decisions from over 50 texts composed among the Archaic Age and the fourth century A.

Additional info for Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture

Example text

The precise make-up of the procession would vary 88 89 Once again, the bibliography on this topic is extensive, but see esp. Schmitt-Pantel (1992); Bowie (1995) on the enormous range of sacrificial practice in the Greek world; van Nijf (1997) 129–240 on the place of professional guilds in festive banqueting and processions; see also further discussion below, pp. 31–4; on food and religion more generally, see Wilkins and Hill (2006) 81–109. Schmitt-Pantel (1992), esp. 527–44 for inscriptions, listed by region and date.

Comic, mocking portrayals of the Greek symposium are everywhere in imperial literature. The satirical work of Lucian, from the mid-second century ce, is a good example. Lucian exemplifies as well as any other author the high visibility for literary symposium traditions in this period. His work is packed with references to philosophical conversation at the symposium, sometimes included briefly and in passing, sometimes as the main focus for a single work. But the primary aim of those references is to debunk and mock, exposing the hypocrisy and pretension of sympotic speech, and ridiculing the idea of the sympotic community as a privileged and cohesive group.

Here the phrase used to describe Zenothemis’ response – ‘solved the problem’ (›luse tŸn ˆpor©an) – is a phrase one might use to describe responses to the sympotic questions posed by guests to each other in conversation in learned symposia like Plutarch’s. Zenothemis’ version of a ‘solution’ is absurd through having no intellectual content whatever; it exposes the hypocrisy and posturing which Lucian seems to feel always lie behind sympotic interaction. This passage is typical of the ubiquitous use of sympotic jargon by Lucian and many of his contemporaries, and gives us a glimpse of how familiar sympotic customs and sympotic language were to contemporary readers.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.73 of 5 – based on 42 votes