Athenaeus' Deipnosophists (The Learned Banqueters) is a major Imperial period Greek text in and
of itself but also a source of thousands of fragments by hundreds of authors many of whom
would otherwise be entirely unknown to us. This is the first full new critical edition of the
text since that of Georg Kaibel well over a hundred years ago. Kaibel's text is outdated in
many ways including the fact that he undervalued the Epitome manuscripts which he thought had
no independent significance for the constitution of the text. The new edition is based on a
full collation of the manuscripts including not just Venetus Marcianus 447 (A the sole
surviving witness to the complete text) and the various Epitome manuscripts but also a number
of 15th-century hybrid versions of Athenaeus already known in Kaibel's time but ignored by him.
Systematic review of the latter set of manuscripts as well as of early editions also ignored
by Kaibel has allowed numerous conjectures to be reassigned radically altering our sense of
the Early Modern history of the text. A separate parallel edition of the Epitome is also
included. This now becomes the standard text of the Deipnosophistae and a basic reference work.
