Should we take the Deipnosophists seriously?
Beautiful Letters| N° d'inventaire | 23165 |
| Format | 12 x 19 |
| Détails | 300 p., paperback with flaps. |
| Publication | Paris, 2020 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782251451206 |
From the aperitif to the last glass, Athenaeus of Naucratis reports the conversations of a circle of scholars gathered in the house of a high official of the Roman Empire, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. Doctors, musicians, rhetoricians, and philosophers follow the ritual of the Greek banquet, dinner, then the sumposion, a time for wine and intellectual entertainment. But this early colloquium subverts the codes since it begins at the very beginning of the meal and has the banquet itself as its sole object: from the outset, the reader is submerged by an improbable encyclopedia on fruits and vegetables, fish and salted meats, wines and cakes, crockery, courtesans and riddles, and a thousand other curiosities. Moreover, the guests follow a strict rule: they speak only in quotations, thousands of quotations, taken from their libraries, both material and mental. Here we defend the thesis that Athenaeus stages in the Deipnosophists a real circle of great readers and scholars, engaged in a dizzying game: the quotations, exchanged at an infernal pace, are so many pawns to move on the checkerboard of the library, of language, of classical Greek culture. It is therefore in the mode of an ethnography of this scholarly milieu, with its codes and practices, that Christian Jacob invites us to lose ourselves in the labyrinth of words and dishes and in the imaginary of the library, between Babel and Alexandria, between reason and madness, between wandering and dream of mastery. Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco are not far away...
From the aperitif to the last glass, Athenaeus of Naucratis reports the conversations of a circle of scholars gathered in the house of a high official of the Roman Empire, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD. Doctors, musicians, rhetoricians, and philosophers follow the ritual of the Greek banquet, dinner, then the sumposion, a time for wine and intellectual entertainment. But this early colloquium subverts the codes since it begins at the very beginning of the meal and has the banquet itself as its sole object: from the outset, the reader is submerged by an improbable encyclopedia on fruits and vegetables, fish and salted meats, wines and cakes, crockery, courtesans and riddles, and a thousand other curiosities. Moreover, the guests follow a strict rule: they speak only in quotations, thousands of quotations, taken from their libraries, both material and mental. Here we defend the thesis that Athenaeus stages in the Deipnosophists a real circle of great readers and scholars, engaged in a dizzying game: the quotations, exchanged at an infernal pace, are so many pawns to move on the checkerboard of the library, of language, of classical Greek culture. It is therefore in the mode of an ethnography of this scholarly milieu, with its codes and practices, that Christian Jacob invites us to lose ourselves in the labyrinth of words and dishes and in the imaginary of the library, between Babel and Alexandria, between reason and madness, between wandering and dream of mastery. Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco are not far away...