The Web of Athenaeus

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."