Feasting at the end : Eschatological symposia of methodius of Olympus and Julian the Apostate

[Extract] In this article, I position the Symposia of Methodius of Olympus and Julian the Apostate as the key representatives of a distinct 'third wave' in the flexible and long-lived genre of the literary Symposium. I argue that there are two branches of the sympotic tree, one stemming primarily from Xenophon's model and one from Plato's. While modern scholars tend to think of Plato as the most influential sympotic writer, Xenophon's example was more attractive to early Imperial writers of Symposia, who created the 'second wave' of the genre, using it as a collating device particularly interested in questions about the symposium itself. However, the two later Imperial writers present the opposite case. Methodius and Julian belong to a 'third wave' of sympotic writing, ignoring the Xenophontic developments of their immediate predecessors and emphasizing the inspiration of Plato's Symposium, one in a serious and one in a satiric vein.