La battuta di Timagene in Plut. Quaest. Conv. II 634e-f

Abstract

The article provides a new interpretation of a passage of Table Talks, concerning the historian Timagenes of Alexandria and a woman described as ἐμετική (“full to the point of vomiting”). This word may refer to a dietary regimen widely popular in Late Republican and Imperial Rome: this regimen was strongly opposed by physicians and intellectuals. At a first level, Timagenes’ joke is a way of criticizing the cultural habits and pretensions of the Augustan Roman elite; at a second level, it is an allusion to a verse from Euripides’ Antiope and an anecdote concerning Lysimachus of Thrace.