Creator
Athenaeus.
Title
Deipnosophistae.
Coverage
Venice
Publisher
Aldus Manutius and Andrea Torresani
Date
August 1514
Description
This editio princeps of Athenaeus’s Sophisticated Diners consists of the conversations of learned men over elaborate meals about a wide variety of subjects, including philosophy, the law, literature, food, medicine, etc. The text is important for its depiction of culinary habits of ancient Greece, and also retains numerous fragments of otherwise unknown Greek poetry. Aldus had intended to print this, the only surviving work of Athenaeus in the 1490s, and a one-page proof in an earlier Aldine Greek type survives at The Morgan Library & Museum. In a contemporary alla greca binding.
Source
From the collection of T. Kimball Brooker.