Complete Works of Athenaeus by Athenaeus of Naucratis

Among the numerous guests, Masurius, Zoilus, Democritus, Galen, Ulpian and Plutarch are named, but most are probably to be taken as fictitious personages, and the majority take little or no part in the conversation. It is thus a dialogue within a dialogue, after the manner of Plato, although each conversation is so long that, realistically, it would occupy several days. The Deipnosophistae professes to be an account, given by Athenaeus to his friend Timocrates, of a series of banquets held at the house of Larensius, a scholar and wealthy patron of the arts.

In English, Athenaeus's work usually known by its Latin form Deipnosophistae but is also variously translated as The Deipnosophists, Sophists at Dinner, The Learned Banqueters, The Banquet of the Learned, Philosophers at Dinner, or The Gastronomers.

However, the term is shaded by the harsh treatment accorded to professional teachers in Plato's Socratic dialogues, which made the English term sophist into a pejorative. It and its English derivative deipnosophists thus describe people who are skilled at dining, particularly the refined conversation expected to accompany Greek symposia. The Greek title Deipnosophistaí ( Δειπνοσοφισταί) derives from the combination of deipno- ( δειπνο-, 'dinner') and sophistḗs ( σοφιστής, 'expert, one knowledgeable in the arts of ~'). It is a long work of literary, historical, and antiquarian references set in Rome at a series of banquets held by the protagonist Publius Livius Larensis for an assembly of grammarians, lexicographers, jurists, musicians, and hangers-on. The Deipnosophistae is an early 3rd-century AD Greek work ( Ancient Greek: Δειπνοσοφισταί, Deipnosophistaí, lit. 'The Dinner Sophists/Philosophers/Experts') by the Greek author Athenaeus of Naucratis. Frontispiece to the 1657 edition of the Deipnosophists, edited by Isaac Casaubon, in Greek and Jacques Daléchamps' Latin translation

Complete Works of Athenaeus by Athenaeus of Naucratis