The passage concerning the heroic lifestyle, surviving in the Epitome version of Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, is an area full of controversy. Scholars debate over the source(s) used by Athenaeus here and speculate about the relationship of the summarized version of the text to its original unepitomized form, which is lost to us. These two modern approaches to this part of the first book of the Deipnosophistae aim at general clarification of the content and the structure of the discussion of the Homeric lifestyle. I shall instead pay attention to one, relatively short, piece of the text preserved by the epitomator, namely the passage in which the question of the position and functions of archaic singers is addressed (1.14a-d). This passage as a self-contained whole has not yet received serious attention from scholars, although a more detailed analysis of some of its components has occasionally been offered. It seems that a closer examination of individual segments of this text as well as of the linkage between them allows us to elucidate some points of ancient Homeric scholarship and to detect traces of the structural devices used by the author of the Deipnosophistae. The topic is, then, worthy of consideration. The passage is a part of the discussion in which Athenaeus pursues the question of the simplicity of the life of the ancients and shares with other intellectuals an interest in the customs connected with feasting. Drawing illustrations of the ancient way of life from Homer's poems was commonplace in many works written by critics from the Alexandrian age onwards. 1 After the publication of Malcolm Heath's important article, 2 Isaac Casaubon's assumption 3 (widely accepted by scholars of the nineteenth century 4 and still adhered to by some modern classicists 5) that the only source for Athenaeus' description of feasting activities of Homeric heroes was Dioscorides, 6 the author of an exclusively 231 1 The beginnings can be, however, traced as early as Plato's writings (Resp. 3.404B10-C7). On the importance of Homer's poems for ancient considerations of the simplicities of early generations' life see R. Vischer,
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