Abstract

Scholarly interest in the literary aspects of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists has increased greatly over the last decade, but little analysis proceeds from the perspective of the reader. This article seeks to redress that situation by showing how “readerly” engagement involving inter- and intratext renders Athenaeus’ text both meaningful and pleasurable to read. I analyze the text as a dramatization of acts of reading inter- and intratextually. Such reading broadly employs symbolism and symbolic language. Understanding this way of reading and its rhetoric enables modern readers to see the Deipnosophists as a literary work rather than merely a repository of knowledge.