Le Convive Et Le Savant: Sophistes, Rheteurs, Grammairiens Et Philosophes Au Banquet de Platon a Athenee

Why did Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, Lucian and Athenaeus choose to place their prominent scholars at banquets? None of them seems to have known how to behave themselves while eating and drinking at a table as he would have done in the less boisterous setting of a school. Such was the case even with Socrates, who, far from shying away from the pleasures of a good meal, used banquets as a means to lead his drinking companions to philosophy. For a banquet was not merely a formal setting for more free-flowing discussions than elsewhere: it became the very subject of them, and made it possible, on the pretext of an incongruity or pleasant nebulousness, to sway the guest’s initial opinion and lay the groundwork for a common quest for truth. The dinner table and wine reveal an individual as he truly is—a philosopher or an ignoramus—not only through his words, but also through his actions: a well-behaved guest is a true scholar.Yannick Scolan, who holds a PhD in Greek Studies from Université Paris-Sorbonne and an agrégation in classical literature, teaches in preparatory classes for literary studies. He contributes, as an external member, to research carried out by the E.A. 1491 EDITTA team.