C.D. Warner, et al., comp.
The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Critical and Biographical Introduction

By Athenæus of Naucratis (Second Century?)

LITTLE is known that is authentic about the Græco-Egyptian Sophist or man of letters, Athenæus, author of the ‘Deipnosophistæ’ or Feast of the Learned, except his literary bequest. It is recorded that he was born at Naucratis, a city of the Nile Delta; and that after living at Alexandria he migrated to Rome. His date is presumptively fixed in the early part of the third century by his inclusion of Ulpian, the eminent jurist (whose death occurred A.D. 228) among the twenty-nine guests of the banquet whose wit and learning furnished its viands. He was perhaps a contemporary of the physician Galen, another of the putative banqueters, who served as a mouthpiece of the author’s erudition.

Probably nothing concerning him deserved preservation except his unique work, the ‘Feast of the Learned.’ Of the fifteen books transmitted under the above title, the first two, and portions of the third, eleventh, and fifteenth, exist only in epitome—the name of the compiler and his time being equally obscure; yet it is curious that for many centuries these garbled fragments were the only memorials of the author extant. The other books, constituting the major portion of the work, have been pronounced authentic by eminent scholars with Bentley at their head. Without the slightest pretense of literary skill, the ‘Feast of the Learned’ is an immense storehouse of Ana, or table-talk. Into its receptacles the author gathers fruitage from nearly every branch of contemporary learning. He seemed to anticipate Macaulay’s “vice of omniscience,” though he lacked Macaulay’s incomparable literary virtues. Personal anecdote, criticism of the fine arts, the drama, history, poetry, philosophy, politics, medicine, and natural history enter into his pages, illustrated with an aptness and variety of quotation which seem to have no limit. He preserves old songs, folk-lore, and popular gossip, and relates whatever he may have heard, without sifting it. He gives, for example, a vivid account of the procession which greeted Demetrius Poliorketes:—

The hymn of worship which Athenæus evidently disapproved has been preserved, and turned into English by the accomplished J. A. Symonds on account of its rare and interesting versification. It belongs to the class of Prosodia, or processional hymns, which the greatest poets delighted to produce, and which were sung at religious festivals by young men and maidens, marching to the shrines in time with the music, their locks crowned with wreaths of olive, myrtle, or oleander; their white robes shining in the sun.

The Swallow song, which is cited, is an example of the folk-lore and old customs which Athenæus delighted to gather; and he tells how in springtime the children used to go about from door to door, begging doles and presents, and singing such half-sensible, half-foolish rhymes as—

The ‘Feast of the Learned’ professes to be the record of the sayings at a banquet given at Rome by Laurentius to his learned friends. Laurentius stands as the typical Mæcenas of the period. The dialogue is reported after Plato’s method, or as we see it in the more familiar form of the ‘Satires’ of Horace, though lacking the pithy vigor of these models. The discursiveness with which topics succeed each other, their want of logic or continuity, and the pelting fire of quotations in prose and verse, make a strange mixture. It may be compared to one of those dishes known both to ancients and to moderns, in which a great variety of scraps is enriched with condiments to the obliteration of all individual flavor. The plan of execution is so cumbersome that its only defense is its imitation of the inevitably disjointed talk when the guests of a dinner party are busy with their wine and nuts. One is tempted to suspect Athenæus of a sly sarcasm at his own expense, when he puts the following flings at pedantry in the mouths of some of his puppets:—