Digital Athenaeus

DigitalAthenaeusEditor-in-Chief
Monica Berti

Associate Editors
Christopher W. Blackwell (Furman University)
Gregory R. Crane (Tufts University & University of Leipzig)
Robert Gorman (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
Vanessa Gorman (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
D. Neel Smith (College of the Holy Cross)
Bruce Robertson (Mount Allison University)

Supporting Institutions
Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities, University of Leipzig
Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University
Perseus Project, Tufts University
Department of Classics and Religious Studies and Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Online Resources

The Digital Athenaeus is a project for producing a digital edition of the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis. The work is focused on annotating quotations and text reuses in the Deipnosophists in order to accomplish two main results:

  1. Provide an inventory of authors and works cited by Athenaeus.
  2. Implement a data model for identifying, analyzing, and citing uniquely instances of text reuse in the Deipnosophists.

The project provides users with different tools for consulting the text of the Deipnosophists and getting information about authors and works reused by Athenaeus:

The Deipnosophists (i.e., The Learned Banqueters) is the description of several banquet conversations on food, literature, and arts held in Rome at the house of the rich patron Larensius. This work can be considered as an erudite and literary encyclopedia of many curiosities about classical antiquity. It is also an invaluable collection of quotations and text reuses of ancient authors, ranging from Homer to tragic and comic poets and lost historians.

Athenaeus, the author of the Deipnosophists, is almost unknown. The Byzantine lexicon Suda (s.v. Ἀθήναιος 731) describes him as coming from the Egyptian city of Naucratis, being a grammarian, and living in the time of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Athenaeus presents himself as participating in the banquets described in the Deipnosophists with other twenty-two sophists. He offers the account of the conversations to his friend Timocrates.

The text of the Deipnosophists has been transmitted in two different forms: 1) a mutilated copy of the original work (Venetus Marcianus 447), where the first part of the text until Deipn. 3.73e (= 3.4) and other scattered folios are lost; 2) an epitome of the whole work in four copies (Parisinus Suppl. Gr. 841; Laurentianus LX.2; BM Bibl. Regia 16.D.X; Erbacensis 4).

References