Citation et recontextualisation. Le cas des philosophes et des historiens chez Athénée de Naucratis

The Deipnosophists of Athenaeus of Naucratis, a grammarian of the end of the second century AD, is a tale of a conversation between scholars, who meet around the table of Larensis, a rich Roman one bibliophile. The conversation evokes numerous Greek authors and several thousand texts are mentioned. Due to its scale as well as the accumulation of quotations, this text has often been considered as a simple catalog or a compilation, where Athenaeus, without expressing a personal opinion, would do nothing but display a big erudition. I am going focus on the case of the anti-Platonic debates, which Athenaeus deals with in particular in books V and XI, to show, on the contrary, that in Athenaeus’ project there is a real work of reappropriation of the quoted texts and that this work corresponds to the author’s will to celebrate and to preserve a certain Greek knowledge, thus leading the quoted texts to interact. In these books V and XI, we shall see that, in order to criticize Plato because of his errors and forgeries, Athenaeus calls on to the testimonies of Greek historians. Thanks to the choice of quotations and to their organization, he puts forward the idea of a superiority of the testimony of the historians on that of the philosophers.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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