This monumental work of ancient Greek literature, compiled in the 3rd century AD, is an encyclopedic compendium of knowledge, entertainment, and gossip. In this edition, translated and annotated by Charles Duke Yonge, readers will find fascinating insights into everything from ancient cookery to music theory. An essential resource for classicists and historians. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In The Learned Banqueters, Athenaeus describes a series of dinner parties at which the guests quote extensively from Greek literature. The work (which dates to the very end of the second century CE) is amusing reading and of extraordinary value as a treasury of quotations from works now lost. Athenaeus also preserves a wide range of information about different cuisines and foodstuffs, the music and entertainments that ornamented banquets, and the intellectual talk that was the heart of Greek conviviality. S. Douglas Olson has undertaken to produce a complete new edition of the work, replacing the previous Loeb Athenaeus (published under the title Deipnosophists).

Christian Jacob presents a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus's Sophists at Dinner (ca. 200 ce), a text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets. Connecting the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans, Jacob helps the reader navigate the many intersecting paths in this enormous work.

The author of The Deipnosophists was an Egyptian, born in Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile. The age in which he lived is somewhat uncertain, but his work, at least the latter portion of it, must have been written after the death of Ulpian the lawyer, which happened A.D. 228. Athenaeus appears to have been imbued with a great love of learning, in the pursuit of which he indulged in the most extensive and multifarious reading; and the principal value of his work is, that by its copious quotations it preserves to us large fragments from the ancient poets, which would otherwise have perished. There are also one or two curious and interesting extracts in prose; such, for instance, as the account of the gigantic ship built by Ptolemmus Philopator, extracted from a lost work of Callixenus of Rhodes. The work commences, in imitation of Plato's Phaedo, with a dialogue, in which Athenaeus and Timocrates supply the place of Phaedo and Echecrates. The former relates to his friend the conversation which passed at a banquet given at the house of Laurentius, a noble Roman, between some of the guests, the best known of whom are Galen and Ulpian. Athenaeus was also the author of a book entitled, On the Kings of Syria, of which no portion has come down to us.