Saints and Symposiasts

Jason König is a Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Greek Literature in the Roman Empire (2009). He has also edited Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (with Tim Whitmarsh, Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Greek Athletics (2010).

• Part I. Conversation and Community: 1. Locating the symposium; 2. Voice and community in sympotic literature; 3. Plutarch; 4. Athenaeus; 5. Early Christian commensality and the literary symposium; 6. Methodius; 7. Sympotic culture and sympotic literature in Late Antiquity; 8. Macrobius; Part II. Consumption and Transgression: 9. Philosophers and parasites; 10. Food and the symposium in the Greek and Latin novels; 11. Food and fasting in the Apocryphal Acts; 12. Food and fasting in early Christian hagiography; Conclusion.

'This valuable work brings together the Greco-Roman symposium, the literary forms that engaged with it, early Christian engagements and Christian debate in later antiquity over reuses of pagan forms or rejection of earlier luxurious ways. This excellent volume sets the 'social knowledge' of Athenaeus and Plutarch (matched with the inscriptions of the Greek cities of Asia Minor) against the purity and separateness of some early Christian thought; it richly explores 'talking with the dead' in pagan and Christian contexts (the great Greek past of Plato and Aristotle in Galen and Tertullian). Unmissable.' John Wilkins, The Journal of Roman Studies