Bible Review

Plutarch, Table Talk 614E, 615A.

See Chan-Hie Kim, “The Papyrus Invitation,” Journal of Biblical Literature 94:3 (1975), pp. 391–402.

Plutarch, Table Talk 614A-B.

Plato, Symposium 176E.

For evidence, see especially Joan Burton, “Women’s Commensality in the Ancient Greek World,” Greece and Rome 45:2 (October 1998), pp. 143–165.

See Plutarch, Table Talk 615E; Lucian, Symposium 8-13.

Plato, Symposium 176D.

Athenaeus, writing sometime around 200 C.E., described the Greek custom in this way: “When the unmixed wine is poured during dinner, the Greeks call upon the name of the ‘Good Deity,’ giving honor to the deity who discovered the wine; he was Dionysus” (238d, quoting from an earlier source, Philochorus, of the late fourth century B.C.E.). The Jewish prayer quoted above derives from Mishnah Berakot 6.1.