The Composite of Spoken and Written Speech. The Deipnosophists of "Athenaeus" as a Medium of the Invention and Documentation of Sources on Rhetorics between Fictionality and Factuality

The “Deipnosophists” of Athenaeus of Naucratis are a literary work that presents us an insight into ancient rhetorics and speech from various perspectives. Being composed of fictive speeches that join the texts of ancient writings in paraphrases and citations in the conversations of the participants during a banquet, the work reveals in different layers, the composition of the work itself, the conversations, and their writings, especially the ones that focus on rhetorical topics, speech in the essential form of this piece of literature. We argue that Athenaeus invents and composes here a multimedia memory that arranges topics related to the culture of banquets in speeches that range from the factuality of historical accounts about rhetoricians to the fictional story of the event itself that nearly completely consists of speeches as praise of this kind of culture. The “Deipnosophists” of Athenaeus comprises both spoken and written aspects of ancient rhetorics and speeches that blend into each other ranging from the framing narrative of a meeting of Athenaeus who tells the story of the event to a friend, the speeches of the deipnosopshists, and the presentation of the texts of the works paraphrased and cited as speech in the banquet.