Literary Banquets of the Imperial Era

Plutarch’s Table Talk asserts the “friend-making” (philopoios) effect of commensality (612D), aligning the work with Plutarch’s broader interest in the subject of friendship (O’Neil 1997) and with an important topic of philosophic consideration (Baumbach and von Möllendorff 2017: 140). Yet Table Talk’s participants avoid direct discussion of friendship and of how the symposium helps to forge it, leaving readers to discern an implicit ethics of amity.

Within the Noctes Atticae (NA), the Antonine author Aulus Gellius often includes symposiastic and convivial scenes, incorporating Greek literary traditions of miscellanistic writing into his project. These scenes have received significant attention for what they reveal about cultures of reading in the Roman world (Johnson), and the ways in which they negotiate between Greek and Roman intellectual models, as the debates staged in Gellius’ dining scenes often pit representatives of both cultures against one another (Holford-Strevens, Gunderson, Keulen, Howley 2014, 2018).

Macrobius’ Late Antique Saturnalia is widely considered to be one of the latest sympotic texts, but one of the few examples surviving in Latin (König 2012). Despite Macrobius’ heavy use of Greek literary symposia from Plato to Plutarch, scholars have been reluctant to posit any meaningful relationship between Macrobius and his Greek forerunners.

The focuses of this paper are Athenaeus’ appropriations of metasympotic lines known as by the Greek archaic poet Theognis, and the functionality of such reuses for the construction of Athenaeus’ own sympotic conversation. The Theognidea are renowned as an anthology of elegiac metasympotic poetry: composed to be performed at symposia, they mention or deal with the symposion or its activities, like much other Greek archaic poetry (see Hobden 2013: 25-65).

Much scholarly attention has been paid in recent years to local identity in the Imperial period (e.g. Jones 2004 and the papers in Whitmarsh 2010), including in Plutarch’s Quaestiones Convivales, where characters assert their civic and regional identities as part of a pattern where “shared Greek culture is formed from Panhellenic diversity” (König 2007: 63). Relatively little attention has been paid, however, to the dynamics surrounding early Greek poetry and local identity in these symposia (though see Bowie 2013).