Athenaeus was a writer who lived during the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. That’s pretty much all that is known of his bibliography despite his massive length of his work the Deipnosophists (a title which literally means “Dinner Sophists”). The genre of this work has no easy parallels in English literature because of the following:
1) It’s a dialogue supposedly set during a dinner party (even though reading the work would take several days).
2) All of the talk of the dialogue relates to food or feasting (such as obvious topics like food and wine but also topics such as types of dinner guests, table manners and entertainment).
3) The speakers are primarily interested in showing how well read they are and so they respond to each with either direct quotes or summaries from many different examples of Greek literature.
4) While there is no narrative, for the most part the speakers’ conversation can be grouped into categories.
The main reason that scholars study the Deipnosophists is because of item 3. Athenaeus preserves a great deal of information about Greek authors and literature that has otherwise been lost.
What does this have to do with slaves? Well Athenaeus recounts a number of treatises about slaves that have been lost and so if you study Greek slavery long enough you quickly come to a series of citations about Athenaeus. Usually this is because he preserves sections of writers like Posidonius, whom we know wrote about the slave wars on Sicily.
However, this is a bit unfair to Athenaeus in my opinion because it elides how Athenaeus is pretty much the only ancient writer to write about slaves systematically in antiquity. The problem is that he writes about slaves systematically in his own terms, which is to say, he assembles a large selections of quotes and summaries from ancient authors that for the most part tend to the bizarre or unusual. Or how slaves relate to dining, which is his concern in a large part of Book 6.
Below is a passage I’ve translated from Athenaeus that gives a sense of how he goes about writing about slaves and what he’s interested in:
“Indeed recall, in its entirety, that which the philosopher Posidonius said of those, who despising the absent guards of the miners, then seized the acropolis in Sounion and for a long time plundered Attica. And this occurred at the same time as the second uprising of slaves in Sicily. There were many such uprisings, and they killed over a hundred thousand of the (domestic) slaves. Caecilius the rhetor from the foreland of Kale gave similar accounts about the slave wars.” (6.272f. translation my own).
Here, Athenaeus is interested in pointing out how two different Latin authors, Posidonius and Caecilius, both wrote on this slave revolt in Sounion. That is to say, Athenaeus is producing cross-reference. He also takes time to comment on the extraordinary number of slaves who were killed, over 100,000. Such numbers in Athenaeus, as in most ancient authors, should not be taken at face value.
1) It’s a dialogue supposedly set during a dinner party (even though reading the work would take several days).
2) All of the talk of the dialogue relates to food or feasting (such as obvious topics like food and wine but also topics such as types of dinner guests, table manners and entertainment).
3) The speakers are primarily interested in showing how well read they are and so they respond to each with either direct quotes or summaries from many different examples of Greek literature.
4) While there is no narrative, for the most part the speakers’ conversation can be grouped into categories.
The main reason that scholars study the Deipnosophists is because of item 3. Athenaeus preserves a great deal of information about Greek authors and literature that has otherwise been lost.
What does this have to do with slaves? Well Athenaeus recounts a number of treatises about slaves that have been lost and so if you study Greek slavery long enough you quickly come to a series of citations about Athenaeus. Usually this is because he preserves sections of writers like Posidonius, whom we know wrote about the slave wars on Sicily.
However, this is a bit unfair to Athenaeus in my opinion because it elides how Athenaeus is pretty much the only ancient writer to write about slaves systematically in antiquity. The problem is that he writes about slaves systematically in his own terms, which is to say, he assembles a large selections of quotes and summaries from ancient authors that for the most part tend to the bizarre or unusual. Or how slaves relate to dining, which is his concern in a large part of Book 6.
Below is a passage I’ve translated from Athenaeus that gives a sense of how he goes about writing about slaves and what he’s interested in:
“Indeed recall, in its entirety, that which the philosopher Posidonius said of those, who despising the absent guards of the miners, then seized the acropolis in Sounion and for a long time plundered Attica. And this occurred at the same time as the second uprising of slaves in Sicily. There were many such uprisings, and they killed over a hundred thousand of the (domestic) slaves. Caecilius the rhetor from the foreland of Kale gave similar accounts about the slave wars.” (6.272f. translation my own).
Here, Athenaeus is interested in pointing out how two different Latin authors, Posidonius and Caecilius, both wrote on this slave revolt in Sounion. That is to say, Athenaeus is producing cross-reference. He also takes time to comment on the extraordinary number of slaves who were killed, over 100,000. Such numbers in Athenaeus, as in most ancient authors, should not be taken at face value.