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.

Witty nicknames, crude jokes, public nudity and lavish monuments, all of these things distinguished Greek courtesans from respectable citizen women in ancient Greece. Although prostitutes appear as early as archaic Greek lyric poetry, our fullest accounts come from the late second century CE. Drawing on Book 13 of the Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae--which contains almost all known references to hetaeras from all periods of Greek literature--Laura K. McClure has created a window onto the ways ancient Greeks perceived the courtesan and the role of the courtesan in Greek life.

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).

An international team of literary specialists explore Athenaeus' work as a whole, and in its own right. Almost all classicists and ancient historians make use of Athenaeus; 'Athenaeus and his World' is the first sustained attempt to understand and explore his work as a whole, and in its own right. The work emerges as no mere compendium of earlier texts, but as a vibrant work of complex structure and substantial creativity. The book makes sense of the massive and polyphonous Deipnosophistae, the quarry upon which classicists and ancient historians depend for their knowledge of much ancient literature, particularly Comedy, and also the source of much of the data used by modern historians for the social history of the classical and Hellenistic worlds. The 41 chapters; written by an international team of literary specialists and historians, each tackle a significant feature, and the book is divided into seven sections, each prefaced by introductory remarks from the editors.

The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once again by his death in 323 BCE. Over time, trade and intellectual achievement resumed, but Cleopatra's death in 30 BCE brought this Hellenistic moment to a close--or so the story goes. Angelos Chaniotis reveals a Hellenistic world that continued to Hadrian's death in 138 CE.

Classical scholarship tends to treat anonymous authorship as a problem or game--a defect to be repaired or mystery to be solved. But anonymity can be a source of meaning unto itself, rather than a gap that needs filling. Tom Geue's close readings of Latin texts show what the suppression or loss of a name can do for literature.