The Joseph story has money the brothers paid for grain surreptitiously returned to their sacks, in some sense a loan only but, as it turned out, an act concealing a gift, which led to reconciliation. Topics in the Two Debtors parable covering debt, sin, and forgiveness rework these features of the Joseph story.

Hannibal was forced by Roman pressure to flee Carthage in secret (195). Livy’s narrative is lively and amusing. Like a Classical Greek taking refuge with a Persian satrap, he spent the rest of his life with eastern royalty. His flight was precipitated by the arrival of three Roman envoys, whose mission was to accuse Hannibal of plotting war against Rome in combination with the Seleucid king Antiochus III. He had long prepared for something like this, and left the African mainland for a nearby island, Cercina. There he found Phoenician ships and suspected they might take news of him to Carthage. So he organized a midsummer banquet, including a huge improvised sunshade or marquee made from the ships’ sails. In the morning the crews awoke with hangovers to find their ships incapacitated. He sailed for Tyre, then Daphne, a suburb of Antioch. Back at Carthage, his town house was formally demolished.

Chapter 4 analyses epigrams and objects between 100 ?? and ?? 100, and discusses how objects and texts engage with one another in expressing the idea of carpe diem. Rarely studied Greek epigrams from the Garland of Philip and texts by the Latin authors Martial, Pliny the Elder, and Petronius point to exciting interplay between the textuality of epigrams and the presence of objects. Besides more conventional literary sources, the analysis also includes numerous artworks and inscriptions. Particular attention is paid to cups, such as the well-known Boscoreale cups, as well as to gems. This interdisciplinary chapter makes a strong case for studying literature alongside other forms of cultural production.

The introduction provides an overview of certain recurring subjects of the study, including music’s role in fostering the “good cheer” of the banquet, the power of metasympotic representations, the use of music for communication and display, the social and political aspects of self- and class-display through social music, ways in which elite music-making at archaic and classical symposia influenced customs of later periods and their interpretation, and the interconnections between dining and the festival/theater in all periods.

Certain universal and more or less perennial aspects of human perceptions of the night influence the representation of nightlife in ancient texts. But beyond the stereotypes, we may recognize tensions between conservative perceptions and a continually changing reality. In the Roman empire, we may observe certain recurring elements of a ‘nocturnal koine’, the result of general trends. The factors that shaped nightlife in the Roman empire include the diffusion of voluntary associations and their convivial activities, the donations of benefactors for nighttime activities (baths, gymnasia, public banquets), the prominent place of nocturnal rites in cults with a soteriological or initiatory aspect, and efforts to increase the safety in cities during the night. These factors should be considered within a broader context—that of the gradual and continuous colonization of the night with the activities of the day.

Certain universal and more or less perennial aspects of human perceptions of the night influence the representation of nightlife in ancient texts. But beyond the stereotypes, we may recognize tensions between conservative perceptions and a continually changing reality. In the Roman empire, we may observe certain recurring elements of a ‘nocturnal koine’, the result of general trends. The factors that shaped nightlife in the Roman empire include the diffusion of voluntary associations and their convivial activities, the donations of benefactors for nighttime activities (baths, gymnasia, public banquets), the prominent place of nocturnal rites in cults with a soteriological or initiatory aspect, and efforts to increase the safety in cities during the night. These factors should be considered within a broader context—that of the gradual and continuous colonization of the night with the activities of the day.

This chapter explores the ways in which the practice of cookery and the act of eating were understood as analogous to the making and experiencing of literature in early modern writing – a set of similarities that was both exciting and disquieting. It begins with the word “conceit,” which could refer either to a wittily rhetorical piece of language or to something dainty and edible. This leads to a discussion of the ways in which eating causes distinctions between people and practices both to be made and to break down in this period (especially in the work of Shakespeare and Jonson). It ends with a discussion of the place of food in the writings of Margaret Cavendish – who distinguishes her own labours from the typical culinary work of women even as she sees Nature as a productive cook – and John Milton, who places a striking emphasis on prelapsarian eating as common to human and angel, while recognizing food as the most devilish of temptations.