SYMPOTIC QUESTIONS

Many of the essays in this volume, the introduction included, interrogate the idea that Christian writers felt uncomfortable with the dialogue form, and so either neglected it completely or else used it very differently from their Greco-Roman or Jewish counterparts. There are reasons for expressing reservations about those formulations. Most strikingly, it is easy enough to amass a long series of counterexamples: many Christian writers did write dialogues. However, one area where dialogue form does come to a very conspicuous halt is in the area of sympotic writing. The Greek literature of the Roman Empire is saturated with descriptions of sympotic commensality and philosophical conversation. For whatever reason, literary representation of the symposium seems to have been an attractive vehicle for writing which explores and dramatises the relations between Greek past and Greek present (more on that below). But it is hard to find anything in Christian literature which resembles Plato's Symposium or Xenophon's, or even the more loosely structured, miscellanistic composition of Plutarch's Sympotic Questions, with their vivid sketches of social context and their conversational style, or of Athenaeus' more chaotic compilation of quotations and erudite sympotic discussions, the Deipnosophists. Methodius' Symposium is one exception. But there is little to match it within the landscape of surviving Christian writing throughout the long period of the first to fifth centuries CE. Similarly within classicising pagan literature of late antiquity, there are relatively few examples.