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

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.

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).

'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 Studies