Athenæus

Athenæus, a Greek writer, born at Naucratis in Egypt. He lived first at Alexandria and afterwards at Rome about the close of the 2d and beginning of the 3d century. His work, entitled Deipnosophistæ ('Banquet of the Learned'), in fifteen books, but of which we possess only the first two, and parts of the third, eleventh, and fifteenth, in an abridged form, is very interesting as one of the earliest collections of Ana. It consists of extracts from more than 1500 books, put in the form of table-talk at an imaginary banquet, at which Galen the physician and Ulpian the jurist are among the guests. Every possible subject is introduced and illustrated by fragments from the poets, dramatists, and philosophers; but of the learned author's thousand and one interests, gastronomy seems to have been the dearest. But he loved 'titbits' of scandal no less than of cookery, for he tells many stories to the discredit of people whom history praises, which of course we are not by any means bound to believe. His dialogue is prolix and lumbering; and his work is not irradiated by a single gleam of genius, and has only achieved immortality through being a storehouse of miscellaneous information that otherwise would have been lost. The best editions are by Schweighäuser (14 vols. 1801-7), Dindorf (3 vols. 1827), Meineke (4 vols. 1859-67), and Kaibel (1887-90). An English translation was published in 1854.