Athenaeus (ca. 170-ca. 230 CE), a Greek of Naucratis in Egypt, lived in Rome and wrote a historical work now lost. Of the fifteen books of his surviving Deipnosophists ('Sophists at Dinner'), the first two and parts of the third, eleventh, and fifteenth exist only in summary, the rest apparently complete. In it he pretends to tell a friend about a banquet at a scholar's house whither the learned guests brought extracts from poetry for recitation and...