Athenaeus was a native of Naucratis, a Greek city in Egypt, and he wrote the Deipnosophists in the early part of the 3rd century A.D. It is a long and extremely diffuse work, which is presented as a series of erudite discussions over dinner. Athenaeus includes frequent quotations from earlier authors, especially from the writers of comedies, which give us a fascinating glimpse of a wide range of ancient Greek life and literature that would otherwise be unknown. Naturally, food and drink are the most common topic of conversation throughout, but often that is merely the starting point for long digressions.

The Deipnosophists is traditionally split into fifteen books, some of which have survived only in an abbreviated form. The excerpts here represent about one third of what has survived of the Deipnosophists. The excerpts have been chosen to illustrate the history of the Hellenistic world, and they contain quotations from some of the historians of that period. The translation is by C.D.Yonge (1854).

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