Athenaeus facts for kids

Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek writer and scholar. He lived around the end of the 100s AD and the beginning of the 200s AD. He was known as a rhetorician, which means he was skilled in speaking and writing. He was also a grammarian, someone who studied language and grammar.

Athenaeus wrote about a special kind of fish called "thratta." He also wrote a history of the Syrian kings. Sadly, these two works are now lost. His most famous work that still exists today is called Deipnosophistae. It has fifteen volumes, which is a lot of books!

The Deipnosophistae: A Feast of Ancient Knowledge

The Deipnosophistes is like a story about an ancient Greek dinner party. Here, guests play a game called Kottabos while listening to music from an Aulos.

The Deipnosophistae means "dinner-table philosophers." It's a huge collection of information. While it mostly talks about dining and food, it also covers many other fun topics. You can find details about music, songs, dances, games, and even fancy lifestyles from ancient times.

What You'll Find in the Books

Athenaeus mentions almost 800 different writers and 2500 separate works in his book. Imagine how much he must have read! One character in his book even brags about reading 800 plays from ancient Greek comedy. Without Athenaeus, we would know much less about the ancient world. Many old Greek writers would be almost completely forgotten.

The Deipnosophistae is written like a long conversation. It's a story told by someone named Athenaeus to his friend Timocrates. They talk about a big dinner party held at the home of Larensius. Larensius was a rich person who loved collecting books and supporting artists.

The book is like a dialogue within a dialogue, similar to how the famous philosopher Plato wrote. The conversations go on for a very long time! The topics usually start from something at the dinner. But they quickly spread to all sorts of literary and historical subjects. This includes tricky points about grammar. The guests are supposed to be quoting things from memory.

Who Are the Dinner Guests?

There are twenty-four named guests at this dinner party. Some have names like Galen and Ulpian. However, they are probably made-up characters. Most of them don't even join in the conversation. If the character Ulpian was the famous lawyer, then the book might have been written after his death in 223 AD. But in Athenaeus's story, Ulpian dies a natural death, not by murder.

How the Book Survived

The full version of the Deipnosophistae has some missing parts. It was saved in only one old handwritten copy, called manuscript A. Shorter versions of the text exist in two other manuscripts, C and E. Scholars like Georg Kaibel and Isaac Casaubon helped us read and understand this important work today.

In the 1600s, an English writer named Sir Thomas Browne wrote about Athenaeus. This shows that scholars became interested in the "Banquet of the Learned" again after it was published in 1612.

See also

In Spanish: Ateneo para niños