Saints and symposiasts : the literature of food and the symposium in Greco-Roman and early Christian culture / Jason König.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

König, Jason, author.

Series:

Greek culture in the Roman world.

Greek culture in the Roman world

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Symposium (Classical literature).

Food in literature.

Greek literature--History and criticism.

Greek literature.

Latin literature--History and criticism.

Latin literature.

Christian literature, Early--History and criticism.

Christian literature, Early.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 417 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Other Title:

Saints & Symposiasts

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Conversation and community

Locating the symposium

Voice and community in sympotic literature

Plutarch

Athenaeus

Early Christian commensality and the literary symposium

Methodius

Sympotic culture and sympotic literature in late antiquity

Macrobius

Consumption and transgression

Philosophers and parasites

Food and the symposium in the Greek and Latin novels

Food and fasting in the Apocryphal Acts

Food and fasting in early Christian hagiography.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-139-56402-1

1-139-88711-4

1-283-61042-6

9786613922878

1-139-55044-6

1-139-55540-5

1-139-54919-7

1-139-55415-8

1-139-55169-8

1-139-04718-3

OCLC:

811068302