In <i>The Web of Athenaeus,</i> Christian Jacob produces a completely fresh and unique reading of Athenaeus’s <i>Sophists at Dinner</i> (ca. 200 ce). Jacob provides the reader with a map and a compass to navigate the unfathomable number of intersecting paths in this enormous work: the books, the quotations, the diners, the dishes served, and—above all—the wordplay, all within the simulacrum of an ancient Greek library. A text long mined merely for its testimonies to lost classical poets, the <i>Sophists at Dinner</i> has now received a full literary re-imagining by Jacob, who connects the world of Hellenistic erudition with its legacy among Hellenized Romans. <i>The Web of Athenaeus</i> simultaneously offers a literary history of the rarest and finest of Greek culture along with a creative anthropology of a Roman imperial world obsessed with the Greek past.