In this dissertation I analyze how Greek Imperial literature represents and comments on urban everyday life and popular culture. By focusing on literature my purpose is to argue that the unofficial, synchronic, and everyday dimension of culture permeated even a cultural field that was largely confined to the upper and upwardly mobile social groups of the Hellenophone Roman Empire. Literate individuals in the Roman Empire experienced their daily lives in urban centers by moving through a fluid patchwork of social occasions, assuming different identities suggested by the barbershop, the baths, the street. Authors and readers configured their relation to wider contemporary culture largely through the symbolic representation of such everyday urban spaces and occasions. As my central case study I examine the Life of Aesop, a serio-comic novelistic biography about the presumed inventor of the fable. The work circulated anonymously and has survived in a variety of Imperial and Byzantine recensions.

Taking into account the sociology of ancient readerships I argue, in chapter 1, against an interpretive model, commonly applied in cultural studies of the period, which associates socio-economic groups with specific literary forms. I propose instead a broader definition of ancient popular literature as written narrative that engages with the everyday dimensions of culture surrounding the typical Greek Imperial reader in the urban centers of the Roman Empire. By showing the importance of this everyday dimension in the scribes’ reader-response to the Life I relate their mode of reading to the marginal cultural identity that learned readers acquired through their social experience of urban life.

In Chapter 2 I establish that the proliferation of scribal recensions in the Imperial and Late Antique circulation of the Life was a feature of writing and not the result of oral multiformity. The work’s anonymity, the narrative’s dramatic settings of everyday urban spaces, and the social discourses implicit in this kind of literary expression encouraged the scribes to continually and freely “retell” the Life as they copied it. In Chapter 3, I outline the literary representation of the urban everyday in Greek Imperial literature, more generally, in terms of urban space and time. Within this context, I relate these narrative modes to the Life of Aesop and the similarly serio-comic joke-book Philogelos, and I explore the ideological continuities throughout the gamut of narrative genres.

Finally, in Chapter 4, I examine one specific literary theme of everyday realism: narratives of promiscuous sexuality and of prostitution in connection to everyday urban spaces. Through my analysis of this particular theme I address the dynamic tensions of simultaneous attraction and marginalization through which the elite and the upwardly mobile configured their position towards the everyday and their broader urban contexts. I conclude by suggesting that the ideology of exclusivism that permeates urban narratives is a conceptual framework that was not confined to the elitist conditioning of the pepaideumenoi but ran through a cross-section of social hierarchy.