The Dinner Party

So who would you have over for dinner?

Assuming, of course, that you could have anyone from history and that there was no language barrier.

You can only have ten guests, though. That’s a rule.

Here’s my list:

Servilia (see “Chickpea,” below, for her biography)
Benjamin Franklin
Frederick the Great
Catherine the Great
Voltaire
Talleyrand
Oscar Wilde
Shakespeare
Benvenuto Cellini
Alcibiades

It’s weighted toward the Enlightenment project, but then that’s my bias anyway.

I went round and round about Samuel Johnson, but decided against inviting him because he wouldn’t have let anyone else talk.

People like Cellini, Servilia, and Alkibiades are invited not only because they would make good company, but because they’d be able to tell us about a lot of other famous people. Cellini knew everyone in the Rennaissance. Akibiades knew Socrates, Plato, and practically everyone else in those stirring and tragic times. Servilia was Caesar’s lover, Brutus’ mother, Cato’s half-sister, and knew everyone else in the late Roman Republic personally, from Cicero on down.

As for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I’ll have to represent those myself.

Near-misses included Mary Shelley, Tu Fu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Li Po, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, and Niccolo Macchiavelli.

If it were your party, who would you invite?