Coming late to the table : Methodius in the context of sympotic literary development

[Extract] When Methodius wrote the most famous of his works, the Symposium, or On Chastity, the Symposium was a popular genre.¹ Imperial Symposia abounded, which took as their models and modified the founding Socratic Symposia of Plato and Xenophon. Plutarch in the 2nd century wrote not one, but two sympotic works: Quaestiones Convivales is a collection of different sympotic moments that took place over many years, and Septem Sapientium Convivium (Symposium of the Seven Wise Men) recounts the conversations at a wedding banquet set in the mythical time of the archaic wise men, couching a collection of archaic wisdom within an elaborate narrative structure. In the early 3rd century, Athenaeus wrote the Deipnosophistae, a sprawling work that covers a dinner party among friends in Rome and amasses an enormous amount of quotation from the archive. Other Christians used the genre as well: Lactantius, an exact contemporary of Methodius, wrote a Latin Symposium on his way from North Africa to the court of Diocletian, which may or may not survive.² The popularity of the Symposium continued well after Methodius, with Julian the Apostate and Macrobius, among others, turning their hand to the genre.