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    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      05 September 2012
      23 August 2012
      ISBN:
      9781139047180
      9780521886857
      9781108820196
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047180
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.77kg, 430 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (229 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.62kg, 430 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Classical Studies, Classical Studies (General), Classical Literature, Religion, Church History
      Series:
      Greek Culture in the Roman World
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    • Selected: Digital
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    Subjects:
    Classical Studies, Classical Studies (General), Classical Literature, Religion, Church History
    Series:
    Greek Culture in the Roman World
    Information

    Book description

    Greek traditions of writing about food and the symposium had a long and rich afterlife in the first to fifth centuries CE, in both Greco-Roman and early Christian culture. This book provides an account of the history of the table-talk tradition, derived from Plato's Symposium and other classical texts, focusing among other writers on Plutarch, Athenaeus, Methodius and Macrobius. It also deals with the representation of transgressive, degraded, eccentric types of eating and drinking in Greco-Roman and early Christian prose narrative texts, focusing especially on the Letters of Alciphron, the Greek and Roman novels, especially Apuleius, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the early saints' lives. It argues that writing about consumption and conversation continued to matter: these works communicated distinctive ideas about how to talk and how to think, distinctive models of the relationship between past and present, distinctive and often destabilising visions of identity and holiness.

    Reviews

    'This valuable work brings together the Greco-Roman symposium, the literary forms that engaged with it, early Christian engagements and Christian debate in later antiquity over reuses of pagan forms or rejection of earlier luxurious ways. This excellent volume sets the ‘social knowledge’ of Athenaeus and Plutarch (matched with the inscriptions of the Greek cities of Asia Minor) against the purity and separateness of some early Christian thought; it richly explores ‘talking with the dead’ in pagan and Christian contexts (the great Greek past of Plato and Aristotle in Galen and Tertullian). Unmissable.'

    John Wilkins Source: The Journal of Roman Studies

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