Contrasting Banquets: A Literary Commonplace in Philo’s On the Contemplative Life and Other Greek and Roman Symposia

Abstract

When Philo says in On the Contemplative Life what I cite herein, he locates his work securely in the literary tradition of Greek and Roman symposia. For as Athenaeus’s similar type of remark in the second quotation suggests, it became a commonplace in Greek and Roman literary symposia to contrast one’s own symposium or favored banquet practices with those of Others. In this paper I show first that “contrasting banquets” is a commonplace of the Greek and Roman literary tradition to which Philo’s description of the meals of the Therapeutae belongs. Then I show how Philo chooses not to use perhaps the defining characteristic of the Greek and Roman literary symposia per se, the dramatic dialogue format, which represents characters conversing over a meal. Finally, I show why Philo eschews the sympotic dialogue format in his account of the Therapeutae’symposia in On the Contemplative Life. He wishes to play down the conflicts, especially over competing ideas, for which the sympotic dialogue form is especially well suited. Instead, Philo idealizes the harmoniousness and unity of the Therapeutae community at their meals, in contrast to the discord and drunkenness characteristic of Others’ banquets.

But since the story of these well-known symposia is full of such follies, and stand self-convicted in the eyes of any who do not regard conventional opinions and the widely circulated report which declares them to have been all that they should be, I will describe in contrast the festal meetings of those who have dedicated their own life and themselves to knowledge and the contemplation of the verities of nature, following the truly sacred instructions of the prophet Moses. (Philo, On the Contemplative Life)¹

But in the symposium of Epicurus there is an assemblage of flatterers praising one another, while the symposium of Plato is full of men who turn their noses up in jeers at one another; for I pass over in silence what is said about Alcibiades. In Homer, on the other hand, only sober symposia are organized. (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae)²