Athénée de Naucratis, le banquet des savants, livre XIV. Spectacles, chansons, danses, musique et desserts (texte, traductions e

In Rome, at the beginning of the 3rd century AD, a Greek person originally from Egypt, Athenaeus of Naucratis, staging the conversations of erudite banqueters, offered a playful synthesis from the eight centuries of Greco-Roman cultural heritage to all the elites of the Roman Empire. Throughout fifteen books, the author depicts a fictitious scholar symposium to a supposed addressee named Timocrates, with discussions on cultural purposes and series of quotations from ancient Greek authors of all kinds and genres. The scholars are invited by a rich Roman Larensios and are searching for the specific words relating to all sorts of subjects: food, cooking, wines, Homer, appetisers, bread, fish, meat, cups, luxury, kings, philosophers, courtesans, comic artists, music, musical instruments, song, dance, fruits, cakes, party games, wreaths, perfume, all in an ironic and anecdotal way. For a long time, classicists and historians used The Deipnosophists (The Learned Banqueters) for its many quotations of lost ancient literature, but it is also an original literary creation, typical of the Second Sophistic.

Six scholars from Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University (historian, archaeologist, philologists and classicists), with the help of a professor from the University of Ioannina (Greece), have worked together for almost ten years to prepare a scientific edition, a French translation (the first since the 18th c.), and a commentary of the Fourteenth book of this singular and amazing work (vol. 1). Three of them and four academic specialists of Athenaeus propose a synthesis on the author, different analyses of his method of quotation, and studies on some specific passages of the selected book.