Athenaeus

Athenaeus of Naucratis was a Greek author and rhetorician from Naucratis in Egypt, active in the late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. He is best known for the *Deipnosophistae* (“The Learned Banqueters”), a lengthy work framed as a series of dinner-table conversations among scholars. Through these discussions, Athenaeus preserves a vast range of quotations and information on Greek literature, food and drink, music, social customs, and everyday life. The *Deipnosophistae* is especially valued because it transmits fragments from many earlier writers whose works are otherwise lost. Little reliable biographical detail about Athenaeus survives beyond his authorship and origin.