Faut-il prendre les Deipnosophistes au sérieux ?

From the aperitif to the last cup, Athenaeus of Naucratis reports the conversations of a circle of scholars gathered in the house of a high official of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the second century AD. Doctors, musicians, rhetoricians, philosophers follow the ritual of the Greek banquet, the dinner, then the sumposion, time for wine and entertainment of the mind. But this early colloquium subverts the codes since it starts at the beginning of the meal and has as its sole object the banquet itself: from the outset the reader is overwhelmed by an improbable encyclopaedia on fruit and vegetables, fish and salted meats, wines and cakes, crockery, courtesans and riddles, and a thousand other curiosities. Moreover, the guests follow a strict rule: they speak only by quotations, thousands of quotations from their libraries, both material and mental. We defend here the thesis that Athenaeus stages in the Deipnosophists a real circle of great readers and scholars, engaged in a vertiginous game: the quotations, exchanged on an infernal rhythm, are as many pawns to move on the checkerboard of the library, of the language, of the classical Greek culture.It is therefore in the mode of an ethnography of this learned environment, with its codes and practices, that Christian Jacob invites us to lose ourselves in the labyrinth of words and dishes and in the imagination of the library, between Babel and Alexandria, between reason and madness, between wandering and the dream of mastery.Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco are not far away... Christian Jacob is director of research at the CNRS and Professor at the EHESS. He has published Des Mondes Lettrés aux Lieux de savoir (2018) in Les Belles Lettres.