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23 results

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  • Chapter 7 - Plutarch at the Symposium

  • Edited by Frances B. Titchener, Utah State University, Alexei V. Zadorojnyi, University of Liverpool
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch
    Published online:
    29 June 2023
    Print publication:
    13 July 2023, pp 138-156

  • Summary

    This chapter assesses the cultural and broader symbolic significance of the symposium in Plutarch’s biographical and philosophical works. It begins by situating Plutarch’s references to the symposium in their cultural context, by examining the symposium/convivium as a key social institution in the Roman imperial period. Next, the chapter discusses the symbolic dimension of conviviality in Plutarch’s oeuvre, through characteristic examples from the Lives and Moralia. It underlines that, for Plutarch, the symposium serves as a tool for evaluating moral character, as well as for conducting cross-cultural comparison. In addition, Plutarch’s interest in philosophical dietetics turns consumption patterns and behaviour at symposia into an important point of focus and concern. The last two sections look closely at Plutarch’s two surviving sympotic works, the Banquet of the Seven Sages and Table Talk. It discusses their genre and literary techniques, their relationship to the philosophical tradition of sympotic writing initiated by Plato and Xenophon, and the central role they both assign to philosophical enquiry.

Ancient Libraries
  • Edited by Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Greg Woolf
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    25 April 2013
  • The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

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