Christian Jacob is a Faculty Member, Anthropologie et histoire des mondes antiques, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Arietta Papaconstantinou is a Reader in Ancient History in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Postclassical and Byzantine Greek in the Classics Department at Georgetown University.

Jacob surveys Athenaeus’s characters and themes; the role of libraries and Athenaeus’s relation to the past; the intersection of Greek symposium with Roman dinner party; how people read; why they were so passionate about words, many of them obsolete or arcane; what such a work might have meant to the original readership; and how the whole farrago hangs together… The book is a welcome introduction to a type of literature that has had a great influence.