The Web of Athenaeus

By Christian Jacob

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674073282
• ISBN13: 9780674073289
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 150 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"