Athenaeus (flourished c.ad 200) was born in Naucratis, a Greek city in the Nile Delta in Egypt, and wrote in Greek. Nothing is known about his life, and his surviving work, the Deipnosophistae, meaning ‘The masters of the art of dining’, can be dated only from internal evidence. It describes at length how 23 men dine together in Ancient rome and records their conversations; their two most frequent topics are homer and wine. Two of the participants are the physician galen and the lawyer Ulpian of Tyre; the others are not based on real persons. The work consists of 15 books, but the first two and part of the third survive only in excerpts.
