Portraits de lecteurs: Athénée de Naucratis et Aulu Gelle

Athenaeus and Aulus Gellius are key authors in order to understand the role of libraries and books in the writing of scholarly texts: extracts and quotations play a central part in their works. Reading practices are also displayed through various characters or through self-reflection. This paper is a first step towards a comparison between these two writers, in order to shed light upon their specific use of books, in its technical, social and intellectual dimensions. Beyond the information they provide us with, Deipnosophists and Attic Nights are essential sources in order to understand a particular idea of culture (paideia), where the knowledge drawn from books inspires various scholarly practices, between memory and performance.