He survives as the author of a fifteen-volume work about a dinner party - the Deipnosophistae - in which learned guests debate food, literature, and everything touched by Greek culture. Two other books, a fish treatise and a history of Syrian kings, are gone.
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Every investigation which is guided by principles of Nature fixes its ultimate aim entirely on gratifying the stomach.
VII, 11. Compare: "I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else", Samuel Johnson, in Life of Johnson
Dorion, ridiculing the description of a tempest in the "Nautilus" of Timotheus, said that he had seen a more formidable storm in a boiling saucepan.
VIII, 19. Compare: "Tempest in a teapot" (proverb).
On one occasion some one put a very little wine into a wine-cooler, and said that it was sixteen years old. "It is very small for its age," said Gnathæna.
XIII, 47.
Writers born in the 170s 6
About this person
Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek rhetorician and grammarian working around the turn of the third century AD. The Suda places him in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, but his scorn for Commodus - who died in 192 - suggests he outlived that emperor. He wrote a treatise on the thratta, a fish cited by comic poets, and a history of the Syrian kings; both are lost. What remains is the Deipnosophistae, a fifteen-volume work that records the wide-ranging conversation of banqueters, preserving fragments of hundreds of earlier texts that would otherwise be unknown.
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