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Saints and Symposiasts : The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture

Some sections of chapter 3 (pp. 66-75 and 81-8) appeared in an earlier form in a book chapter published in 2007 (‘Fragmentation and coherence in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions’, in König, J. and Whitmarsh, T. (eds) Ordering Knowledge in the Roman World, Cambridge: 43-68). That material was thoroughly reworked and expanded, as well as being integrated into a much larger perspective on representation of the symposium in imperial Greek literature.

This book, based on more than a decade of research, examines an unusually extensive body of material, covering not only imperial Greek symposium literature (and also its many Hellenistic and classical predecessors) but also a large volume of early Christian literature, with a special focus on early Christian dialogue and hagiography. It also surveys the cultural history of imperial commensality at length. In the process it makes a complex and nuanced contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Greco-Roman and early Christian literature, and of the range of ways in which the sympotic tradition was reused within imperial culture.