Deipnosophistae in the context of "Athenaeus"

Sopater of Paphos (Ancient Greek: Σώπατρος ὁ Πάφιος) was a 3rd-century BC parodist and playwright. Atheneus reports on his lifetime in his Deipnosophistae. According to Atheneus, Sopater lived in the time of Alexander the Great, and "was still alive in the reign of the second king of Egypt". After Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308-246 BC) succeeded his father on the throne of Egypt in 283/2 BC, and considering that the work of Sopater was likely composed after Ptolemy II's victory against the Gauls in 270 BC and makes reference to him, scholars place Sopater in the last thirty years of the 4th and the first half of the 3rd century BC. He is believed to have spent a significant part of his life spent in Alexandria.

A few of Sopater's works are known to us through Atheneus' Deipnosophistae, these are: Bacchus, Eubulotheombrutus, Pylaeus and Phacis are described in the ancient source as dramas. Other sources like the 10th century Byzantine encyclopedia Suidas count nine works in total: Hippolytus, Physiologus, Silpho, Cnidia, Nekia, Pylaeus, Orestes, Phacis and Bacchus. Sopatros, in addition to the indicative of his Paphos descent, is called a parodist and a phlyax writer in Athenaeus, and a comedian in Suidas.

Mithaecus (Ancient Greek: Μίθαικος) was a cook and cookbook author of the late 5th century BC. A Greek-speaking native of Sicily, Magna Graecia, at a time when the island was rich and highly civilized, Mithaecus is credited with having brought knowledge of Sicilian gastronomy to Greece. Specifically, according to sources of varying reliability, he worked in Sparta, from which he was expelled as a bad influence, and in Athens. He earned an unfavourable mention in Plato's dialogue Gorgias.

Mithaecus is the first known author of any cookbook, and his is the first known (if not extant) Greek cookbook. One very brief recipe survives from it, thanks to a quotation in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus. It is in the Doric dialect of Greek (appropriate both to Greek Sicily and to Sparta) and describes, in one line, how to deal with the fish Cepola macrophthalma, a ribbon-like fish here called tainia (known in Italian as cepola and in modern Greek as kordella):

In Greek mythology, Oxylus (/ˈɒksɪləs/; Ancient Greek: Ὄξυλος, romanized: Óxulos) may refer to:

• Oxylus, daimon of the mountain beech forests, son of Orius (mountain-god of Othrys or the Pindus), who is noted in the Deipnosophistae for fathering the Hamadryads with his own sister Hamadryas.
• Oxylus, son for Ares and Protogeneia, daughter of Calydon.
• Oxylus, king of Elis; from Aetolia, son of Haemon (himself son of Thoas) or of Andraemon.

The Alcmeonis (Ancient Greek: Ἀλκμεωνίς, Alkmeonis, or Ancient Greek: Ἀλκμαιωνίς, Alkmaiōnis) is a lost early Greek epic which is considered to have formed part of the Theban cycle. There are only seven references to the Alcmeonis in ancient literature, and all of them make it clear that the authorship of the epic was unknown. It told the story of Alcmaeon's killing of his mother Eriphyle for having arranged the death of his father Amphiaraus, whose murder was narrated in the Thebaid. One of the surviving fragments is quoted by Athenaeus in the Deipnosophistae: he chose it because it describes a funeral banquet. The lines have very little in common with descriptions of feasts in the Iliad and Odyssey.