A03T01 - Grig

1 Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture
in the Ancient World

lucy grig
Was there such a thing as popular culture in the ancient world? And even if
there was, how on earth can we, as scholars, access it? Can we expect to find
a single ‘popular culture’ across the wide chronological and geographical
terrain represented by the chapters in this book? The scholars contributing
to this volume, a diverse group from across the classical disciplines, and
from different scholarly traditions, share a conviction that ancient popular
culture is both accessible and worth studying. Moreover, there is a shared
conviction that it is important to study ancient popular culture, in that it
will enrich and broaden our understanding of the ancient world, as well as
our conception of the legacy of the ancient world in our own. Although the
chapters collected here do not claim to offer a complete picture of ancient
popular culture, they represent an important step forward in its study.
Classical scholarship has traditionally been concerned with the elite of
the ancient world and their culture. One of the contributors to this book,
Jerry Toner, has argued that classicists, tending to derive ‘from the upper
and upper-middle classes . . . have tended to be content to remain in the
more comfortable thought-worlds of the Roman elite’.1 When popular
culture does come their way, classicists have tended to look upon it with
a considerable degree of condescension. For instance, while discussing the
fascinating Mimes of Herodas W. G. Arnott suggests that it might be
‘healthy’ for classicists ‘occasionally to turn away from the ivory towers
of scholarly pursuits towards the seamier corners of real life’.2 Even more
strikingly, B. E. Perry famously described the ancient novel as ‘a low and
disrespectable level of literature, adapted to the taste and understanding of
uncultivated or frivolous-minded people’.3 This volume will take the
reader beyond the ‘comfortable thought-worlds of the Roman elite’, at
times into ‘the seamier corners of real life’, while demonstrating the
Thanks are due to a number of friends and colleagues who commented on drafts of this chapter or
provided information and suggestions of various kinds: Mirko Canevaro, David Lewis, Cristina
Rosillo-López and Ville Vuolanto.
1
Toner 1995: 22; this applies most fittingly to British-trained classicists, rather than to ancient
historians in general.
2
Arnott 1971: 132. 3
Perry 1967: 98. 1
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2 LUCY GRIG
richness of a culture which is far more rounded than the merely ‘low and
disrespectable’.
The popular culture under examination in this volume will take us
from fifth-century BCE Greece to sixth-century CE Gaul. Both unity and
diversity4 will characterize the phenomena we encounter on this journey.
Objects and subjects under discussion range from children’s toys to
theological speculation, from mental arithmetic to dressing up, from
nicknames to oracles, from fables to musical instruments. The ‘people’
are also a diverse bunch. They are the political actors and theatre audiences
of classical Athens. They are the urban plebs of the Roman Republic, as
well as the subjects of the Roman emperor. They are the oft-chided con-
gregations of late antique preachers. They are children, adults, soldiers,
slaves, peasants and urbanites, performers and spectators. In each case, the
authors in this book seek to examine this cast of characters in their own
terms, to restore their agency. In each case, we show that we can move
beyond a ‘top-down’ view of history, to construct a far more lively picture
of the ancient world, making use of a diverse range of historical sources,
as well as a variety of methodological approaches, taking inspiration from
a rich comparative and theoretical literature.
Nonetheless, this book is not, and does not claim to be, a complete, or
indeed a diachronic history of ancient popular culture. As will become
clear, the chapters show a notable bias towards the Roman world. While
such imbalances are often circumstantial, it is worth pausing to consider
whether in fact there is more than sheer chance involved here. Was it
ultimately the developments of the Hellenistic period that brought about
the conditions for popular culture to flourish? That is, did the smaller,
more equal societies of classical Greece allow less space for the develop-
ment of a specifically popular culture? In any case, it is clear that the
evidential basis for the study of ancient popular culture increases massively
in the Roman imperial period. Even more so, as we shall see, in Late
Antiquity Christianization entailed a new elite interest in the activities of
the lower classes, offering both a new ideological approach and a new
wealth of evidence for ‘popular culture’.
In this introductory chapter I shall lay out the parameters for a study of
ancient popular culture. This involves first of all a substantial study of the
theoretical and historical literature relating to the investigation of popular
culture, ancient and modern. For most of the contributors to this volume,
methodological and theoretical discussions are not an optional extra for
4
Taken from a chapter title of Burke 2009, ‘Unity and diversity in popular culture’.
Introduction 3
the study of ancient popular culture, but an essential aspect. Only at this
point does discussion turn to the ancient world, firstly asking the crucial
question ‘who were “the people?”’, before surveying recent scholarship on
ancient popular culture, then finally turning to investigate key aspects that
constitute ancient popular culture (such as religion, politics, literature and
material culture) and its location (urban, rural, public and private).
Approaching Popular Culture
How can we define popular culture?5 The classicist Holt Parker suggests,
not entirely tongue-in-cheek, that ‘we may not be able to define it, but we
know it when we see it’.6 Parker also provides one of the neatest, breeziest
summaries available of the most important theories in current currency:
Definitions of popular culture as 1) quantitatively superior, 2) qualitatively infer-
ior, 3) mass culture, 4) a product of ‘the people’, 5) a battlefield for hegemony or 6)
a chimera to be deconstructed by Postmodernism, have much to offer, but none is
completely satisfying.7
Some readers will perhaps prefer to skip this section at this point, but it
should already be clear that ‘popular culture’ (like ‘elite culture’) is of
course a construct rather than a self-evident reality, and as such requires
methodological and theoretical interrogation, which will take us from
Romanticism, through Marxism, to postmodernism, with many permuta-
tions in between.
As we shall see, in the definition of popular culture the definition of
culture itself is at stake, and this turns out to be highly contested. No less
a figure than Raymond Williams, founder of the discipline of Cultural
Studies, declared that:
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English
language . . . mainly because it has now come to be used of important concepts
in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible
systems of thought.8
Indeed we shall see, as this survey progresses, that the definition of ‘culture’
at play oscillates wildly, from a pluralistic ‘way of life’ to an elitist ‘high’
5
There are a number of useful readers and introductory books to help readers navigate the large
body of theoretical work on popular culture, which is only briefly introduced here. See, in
particular, Bigsby 1976; Guins and Zaragoza Cruz 2005; Storey 2006, 2008; Strinati 2004.
6 7
Parker 2011: 147. Parker 2011: 169. 8 Williams 1976: 76–7.
4 LUCY GRIG
culture, which can thus be contrasted with a ‘popular’, ‘mass’ or other type
of ‘low’ culture, and back again.9
The history of the study of popular culture, or, as Peter Burke puts it, ‘the
discovery of the people’, goes back as far as the late eighteenth century, with
the development of what was the first serious investigation of ‘folk’
culture.10 As Burke has demonstrated, the academic study of popular
culture was born, not coincidentally, at precisely the time when traditional
popular culture was starting to disappear. The influential poet and critic
Johann Herder was a key figure here, motivated not least by a radically
pluralistic notion of Kultur, rejecting the existing teleological Eurocentric
narrative of cultural superiority.11 Herder made two important collections
of Volkslieder, and contrasted the Kultur des Volkes with the Kultur der
Gelehrten: popular culture and learned culture. Equally influential were the
collections of folk tales made by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm between 1812
and 1857. Jakob Grimm stressed the idea of communal authorship, of
collective creativity, writing ‘Das Volk dichtet’ (‘the people creates’).
Elsewhere in Europe folksongs in particular, but also traditional literature,
featured in a number of national collections. The key intellectual influences
were undoubtedly Romanticism and nationalism, while the impact of
industrialization on traditional culture played a crucial role. The popular
culture envisaged by its champions was undoubtedly rural, communal
rather than individualistic, and largely timeless, or ahistorical. We can
see the continuing presence of these characterizations in the scholarship
that followed.
If traditional popular culture was discovered ‘just in time’12 by this first
generation of scholars, many of their successors strongly believed that this
traditional culture had been replaced by a debased and vulgar substitute.
While there had been concerns about the threat to traditional culture from
mechanized and industrialized civilization, the concern of the ‘learned’ was
now focused on a threat to a much more limited, elitist definition of
‘culture’. In the hugely influential Culture and Anarchy (1869), Matthew
Arnold (who popularized the idea of ‘Philistines’ as the uncultured oppo-
nents of enlightened culture) defined ‘culture’ as knowledge of ‘the best
that has been said and thought in the world’.13 In other words, Arnold
influentially limited the definition of ‘culture’ to what would now be
9
Williams 1976: 77 notes how romantic notions of culture have been ‘politically schizoid,
swimming between radicals and reaction’.
10 11
Burke 2009: 23–48. As discussed by Williams 1976: 25–32. 12 Burke 2009: 40.
13
Arnold 1960: 6. Furthermore, ‘Culture is properly defined as the love of perfection; it is a study
of perfection’: Arnold 1960: 48.
Introduction 5
termed ‘high culture’. Popular culture itself is not specifically defined by

Arnold, and yet it is clearly implied in the ‘anarchy’ opposed to his (high)
‘culture’.14
Mechanization brought about a great transformation in people’s experi-
ence of and participation in culture, as increasingly noted by critics and
scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. In a hugely influential
essay, the German critic Walter Benjamin welcomed the democratic and
participatory opportunities brought about by the mechanical reproduction
of art.15 However, conservative critics contended, equally influentially, that
modern civilization had been overly mechanized and that traditional
hierarchies of culture were now under threat from new technologies of
reproduction. Meanwhile F. R. Leavis took up the mantel of Arnold, in
Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1930), arguing that there was
a clear division between minority culture and mass civilization: the influ-
ence of the former was under threat and the latter was an object of fear and
disapproval.16 Criticism of this new ‘mass culture’ came from the left, as
well as the right, as with the writings of the prolific social critic Dwight
MacDonald, who asserted a clear distinction between mass and popular
culture, asserting of the former: ‘its distinctive mark is that it is solely and
directly an article for mass consumption, like chewing gum’.17 MacDonald
contrasted this mass culture with ‘folk art’, which he saw, like Herder and
the Grimms before him, as ‘a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of
the people, shaped by themselves’ while ‘Mass Culture is imposed from
above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences
are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between
buying and not buying.’18
A pessimistic approach to twentieth-century popular culture often has
its roots in the Marxist analysis of culture. At the heart of this analysis lies
the notion that a society’s culture is determined by its economic base, upon
14
Arnold 1960: 176. Furthermore, he refers to the non-elite in highly derogatory terms, writing of
the ‘raw and uncultivated . . . masses’ and ‘those vast miserable unmanageable masses of sunken
people’: 193.
15
Benjamin 2008.
16
Leavis was concerned about the strength of Americanization, particularly as transmitted
through films: Leavis 1930: 35. ‘They provide now the main form of recreation in the civilized
world; and they involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest
emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with a compellingly
vivid illusion of actual life.’
17
MacDonald 1957: 59.
18
MacDonald 1957: 60. Note that MacDonald specifically criticizes conservative attacks on mass
culture for making the error of confusing it with folk art: 69.
6 LUCY GRIG
which was built an ideological ‘superstructure’.19 It should be noted that

almost right from the start the heavily reductive determinism of this
concept was being modified.20 Nonetheless the basic theory perdures:
that, as a result of the inequality that is built into the relations of produc-
tion, the leading ideas in capitalist society, even including popular culture,
are those of, and those spread by, the ruling classes.
We can see the scholarly approach to popular culture became even more
negative, indeed fatalistic, in twentieth-century thought. Prominent mem-
bers of what is known as the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno, coined the notion of the ‘culture industry’ in 1944.21
In this analysis, even the concept of mass culture was inadequate, as in fact
the masses had no responsibility for this culture at all, which was
a homogeneous, uniform product. The culture industry, it was argued,
uses culture to promote a dominant ideology, and by this means it incor-
porates the people into this ideology, and thus mass conformity, far from
the ‘anarchy’ envisaged by Arnold.22
The idea that the capitalist mode of production produced a closed
system of ‘culture’ from which there could be no escape was shared by
another influential theorist, Louis Althusser. For Althusser, ideology in the
capitalist system ‘interpellates’ the individual as a subject, representing ‘the
imaginary relationship of the individual to their real conditions of
existence’,23 so that we are bound to ignore, or ‘misrecognize’ reality.24
Althusser influentially argued that ideology was a system, a practice, with ‘a
material existence’, produced by ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISAs: for
instance, mass media churches, schools, the family).25 This idea of
19
As most classically stated in the famous Preface and Introduction to Marx’s Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy of 1859: Marx 1976: 3. In The German Ideology of 1845–6 (1974),
Marx and Engels had already argued that the ruling class, having the means of material
production, would inevitably have control of the means of mental production.
20
Even by Engels himself in his letter to Joseph Bloch: ‘According to the materialist conception of
history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Therefore if somebody twists this
into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he is transforming that
proposition into a meaningless, abstract absurd phrase’: Marx and Engels 1977: 75.
21
Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: esp. 120–1.
22
E.g. Adorno 1991: 104: ‘The categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has
anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to
what; conform to what exists anyway, and that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex to
power and omnipotence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity
has replaced consciousness.’
23 24
Althusser 1971: 153. Althusser 1971: 170.
25
Althusser 1971. For application in the context of the ancient world, discussing the Roman
games as an ISA (alongside other theoretical interpretations) see Gunderson 1996: 116–18.
Introduction 7
imposing conformity through cultural means rather than through outright

coercion26 is also key to the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose concept of
‘cultural hegemony’ has been hugely influential in the study of popular
culture.27 Gramsci argued that dominated or subordinate groups (classi
subalterne) were unable to produce their own autonomous, genuinely
popular culture. Rather than understanding this as a version of the rather
crude concept of ‘false consciousness’, the position of these groups is seen
rather by Gramsci as one of ‘contradictory consciousness’ – ‘always divided
and ambiguous’.28
Gramsci’s theories have been hugely influential on the Subaltern Studies
movement,29 while the influence of postcolonial scholarship itself has
important implications for our study of popular culture. More accessibly,
James C. Scott’s idea of ‘infrapolitics’, especially as laid out in Domination
and the Arts of Resistance30 has been cited by many scholars of premodern
popular culture.31 Scott’s key concept of the ‘“hidden transcript” that
represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant’
is a particularly suggestive idea, tying in nicely with theories of the carni-
valesque and its radical potential,32 as discussed further below. But can
popular culture ever seriously challenge dominant, hegemonic culture?
The answer surely lies in understanding cultural relations as dynamic,
rather than static. Here we can look, most helpfully, to Stuart Hall’s seminal
essay ‘Notes on deconstructing the “popular”’ (1981), which clearly stresses
the embeddedness of popular culture: ‘there is no whole, authentic, auton-
omous “popular culture” which lies outside the field of force of the rela-
tions of cultural power and domination’.33 Hall stresses that any proper
understanding of popular culture must, by necessity, be political. He argues
that the dominant culture will always seek to suppress popular culture,
though this is not to say that we need to accept an entirely pessimistic
26
Althusser clearly distinguished between ‘repressive’ and ‘ideological’ state apparatuses.
27
Insofar as Gramsci ever offers a precise definition of this term, it is described as the
‘“spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction
imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is “historically” caused
by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its
position and function in the world of production’: Gramsci 1971: 12.
28
Lears 1985: 569, 570.
29
Note a useful definition of subaltern studies from Bernstein and Byres 2001: 33: ‘the desire to
write history from the viewpoint of subalterns (peasants and workers) as autonomous agents
who create their own forms of oppositional culture and identity, who are not victims and/or
followers, and whose ideas and actions are not to be represented (appropriated) by elite agents
and discourses that claim to speak on their behalf’.
30
Scott 1990, building on his earlier fieldwork-based studies: Scott 1976, 1985.
31
E.g. Forsdyke 2012; Kurke 2011; Toner 2009, all discussed below. 32 Scott 1990: xii.
33
Hall 1981: 232.
8 LUCY GRIG
reading, whereby popular culture is impossible because it is inevitably

defeated by hegemonic forces. Hall stresses that popular culture is both
dynamic and dialectical in nature;34 therefore its position vis-à-vis the
dominant culture and ideology is always Janus-like: ‘In the study of
popular culture, we should always start here: with the double-stake in
popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance,
which is always inevitably inside it.’35 This then gives us a starting point
for wrestling an understanding of ancient popular culture from its mas-
sively unequal source base. Stuart Hall’s contribution thus enables
a constructive approach to popular culture, which does not deny
Gramscian ‘cultural hegemony’, but does allow it to be more permeable
than a conventionally pessimistic reading of Gramsci would allow.
Hall’s insistence on ‘the people’ as both producers and users of culture
can be compared with various poststructuralist approaches which describe
popular culture as bricolage.36 The work of Michel de Certeau, who
stressed the creativity and powers of invention of ordinary people, exam-
ining their ‘ré-emploi’ of popular culture, is particularly relevant here.37
This approach helps break down and through the bald and unhelpful
dichotomies which have traditionally beset the subject, as we have already
seen: does popular culture come properly up from below (e.g. ‘folk cul-
ture’), or is it imposed downwards from the top (e.g. ‘mass culture’)?
Meanwhile Holt Parker has recently suggested that we move our focus
away from the ‘people’ to the objects of the culture itself, to the ‘social life of
things’.38 Parker also suggests that while discussions of the subject remain
34
‘what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define “popular
culture” in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant
culture. It is a conception of culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic’: Hall
1981: 235.
35
Hall 1981: 228. Further, Hall refers to a ‘continuous and necessarily uneven struggle’ by
dominant culture to ‘enclose and confine’ culture: Hall 1981: 233. Cf. Bennett 1986: xv:
‘The field of popular culture is structured by the attempt of the ruling class to win hegemony
and by the forms of opposition to this endeavour. As such, it consists not simply of an imposed
mass culture that is coincident with dominant ideology, nor simply of spontaneously
oppositional cultures, but is rather an area of negotiation between the two within which – in
different particular types of popular culture – dominant, subordinate and oppositional cultural
and ideological values and elements are “mixed” in different permutations.’
36
The concept of social bricolage is taken from Lévi-Strauss 1966: esp. 16–23; for its application to
the study of popular culture see, for example, Hebdige 1979.
37
An ‘art of doing things’: Certeau 1984: esp. xi–xxiii and 15–41. Relevant here too is the growing
interest in contemporary cultural studies in the seemingly straightforward concept of ‘everyday
life’; see Highmore 2002; for the material culture aspect of this in particular, focusing on the
study of ‘things’, see Attfield 2000.
38
See Parker 2011: 159; the term derives from Appadurai 1985: 45, itself building on Baudrillard’s
essay ‘The system of objects’: Baudrillard 1988: 16–17.
Introduction 9
tied to an essentially Marxist framework, the framework of class is best

replaced by that of ‘status’ (which is indeed more readily applicable to the
ancient world). Parker also takes inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu, and his
much-cited notion of ‘cultural capital’.39 In this analysis, Parker suggests,
we can define popular culture as that which is produced for and/or con-
sumed by those without cultural capital.40 Most distinctively, Parker sug-
gests that popular culture can in fact best be understood as ‘unauthorized
culture’,41 the advantage of which is that this definition bears no inherent
political or aesthetic status, and implies no value judgement.
This discussion of Parker’s contribution draws to a close this admittedly
partial survey of theoretical material. As will become clear, some of the
definitions and issues under discussion explicitly deal with the issue of
popular culture under capitalist modernity and can only with difficulty be
applied to a study of premodern popular culture. We shall now look to see
how historians of this period have approached the subject.
Historicizing Popular Culture in the Premodern World
The study of popular culture in the premodern world has first of all built
upon the huge advances in the study of the non-elite made by social
historians. This is not the place for a detailed survey of this huge body
of work, including the predominantly Anglo-Saxon social-science-led
work from the 1960s onwards (part of a strong strain of Marxist
historiography),42 the pioneering work of the French Annales school,43
and the often fascinating insights brought by the study of ‘microhistory’.44
Overall, however, the most important and relevant work from this period is
undoubtedly E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.
The bringing of the cultural dimension to the work of social and economic
history was crucial and the key concept contained in the title is that of
39
Again, an extended definition is elusive, but see Bourdieu 1977: esp. 159–97; Parker 2011:
160, n. 69.
40
Although this definition might be thought too limiting: cultural capital is of course at play
among all social groups.
41
Parker 2011: esp. 165. However, see Canevaro below, who critiques this concept in the case of
classical Athens.
42
See here the special issue of the Journal of Social History of 1976: ‘Social History Today and
Tomorrow?’, esp. Stearns 1976.
43
See, for a useful summary, Clark 1985.
44
See here Muir 1991. The work of Carlo Ginzburg, who coined the term, is discussed by
Canevaro below, notably Ginzburg 1980.
10 LUCY GRIG
making: ‘The working class made itself as much as it was made.’45 That is,
Thompson stressed both the agency of the non-elite and the constructed-
ness of culture – key themes for this project.
Thompson’s work is foundational for many of the new cultural histor-
ians, whose work first came to prominence in the 1970s. We have already
seen that ‘culture’ is a polyvalent term; in the hands of this new wave of
cultural historians, it became markedly symbolic. According to an oft-
favoured definition from the anthropologists Kroeber and Kluckhorn:
Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and
transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human
groups, including their embodiment in artifacts.46
This concentration on the symbolic has been a marked feature of this new
cultural history, as helpfully described by one of its most influential
practitioners, Peter Burke:
cultural historians might usefully define themselves not in terms of a particular
area or ‘field’ such as art, literature and music, but rather by a distinctive concern
for values and symbols, wherever these are to be found, in the everyday life of
ordinary people as well as in special performances for elites.47
This concern for the symbolic is seen in the striking influence of cultural
anthropology, particular the work of Clifford Geertz.48 Geertz’ idea, much
cited, that ‘the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves
ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of
those to whom they properly belong’ has been hugely stimulating for many
historians, who recognize, all the same, that their interpretive task is even
harder than that of the anthropologist.49
This influence has greatly impacted upon cultural historians and the
study of popular culture, in a focus on rituals such as religious festivals but
also other kinds of culturally stereotyped (or ‘ritual’) behaviour, including
feasting, violence and the activities of groups and organizations.50 Among
45
Thompson 1963: 194.
46
Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 181. The symbolic element in this definition is thus more
marked than in, for instance, the more traditional anthropological definition of culture as
‘civilization’, e.g. Tylor 1871: 1: ‘Culture . . . is that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as
a member of society.’
47
Burke 2009: 18–19.
48
Geertz’ method of ‘thick description’ has been particularly influential: see Geertz 1973: esp.
3–30 and 412–53.
49
Geertz 1973: 452.
50
See, for instance, the now classic articles by Natalie Zemon Davis on ‘charivari’, ‘abbeys of
misrule’ and ritual violence, collected together in Davis 1975. Davis in her turn was influenced
Introduction 11
the festivals studied, none has been as influential as the early modern
festival of carnival, particularly as analysed by Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin,
a Russian literary critic and philosopher, wrote prolifically in Soviet Russia,
but was only ‘discovered’ by Western scholarship in the 1960s. Rabelais
and his World, which appeared in English translation in 1968, has had
a massive impact on the study of popular culture (or ‘folk culture’ as
Bakhtin himself calls it).51 Bakhtin argued for the symbolic centrality of
carnival to early modern culture: ‘carnival’ is a place of inversion, of
comedy, of the grotesque, where high becomes low, and the ‘lower bodily
stratum’ reigns supreme. Carnival is ‘a second world and a second life
outside officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated
more or less’;52 it is the place where uninhibited, unofficial discourse,
could be uttered:53 ‘carnival is the people’s second life, organized on the
basis of laughter’.54 It is a place where hierarchical society could, tempora-
rily at least, be infused with its opposite; it is a site of liberation and
renewal.55 For Bakhtin, carnival went beyond the festival itself and he
stressed the strength of the ‘carnivalesque’: ‘a potent, populist, crucial
inversion of all official words and hierarchies in a way that has implications
far beyond the specific realm of Rabelais studies’.56 Bakhtin’s notion of
carnival as providing a crucial site for opposition and rebellion in ‘pre-
political’ societies has made his work particularly stimulating for scholars
of pre-industrial societies.57 Obviously Bakhtin’s work on carnival has
been questioned, critiqued and developed. Certain critiques are almost
immediately apparent. Is it really so easy to write about folk culture on
the basis of an elite text? Is the apparent licence of carnival not just another
form of social control (licensed licence)?58 Should we essentialize carnival
by the great social historian E. P. Thompson; see, in particular, the essays collected in
Thompson 1991.
51
In this volume, the importance of Bakhtin is shown in the chapters by Grig, Hawkins, Jennings
and Toner.
52
Bakhtin 1968: 6.
53
See Scott 1990: 175, n. 91: ‘It doesn’t take much in the way of inference to equate the realm of
official mendacity and dominated discourse with the Stalinist state and the carnivalesque of
Rabelais as an offstage negation and scepticism that will survive repression.’
54
Bakhtin 1968: 8.
55
Bakhtin 1968: esp. 10: ‘The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during carnival time was
of particular significance . . . all were considered equal during carnival time . . . People were, so
to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations.’
56
Stallybrass and White 1986: 7.
57
See, for instance, Le Roy Ladurie 1979; Davis 1975: 97–123, esp. 103. See further discussion
below.
58
E.g. Eagleton 1981: 148: ‘Carnival, after all, is a licensed affair, in every sense, a permissible
rupture of hegemony, a contained popular blow-off as disturbing and relatively ineffectual as
12 LUCY GRIG
in this way, in any case?59 Nonetheless, its importance for the study of
popular culture is almost impossible to overstate.
Bakhtin’s influence on the study of popular culture is not limited to his
work on Rabelais. In fact, of almost equal prominence is his work on
‘heteroglossia’ or polyphony in the novel, extrapolated into a broader
reading of culture itself as many voiced, of language as inherently
‘dialogic’.60 An important aspect of this dialogue is Bakhtin’s argument
for the interpenetration of high culture by low culture. Here we can see
clear thematic continuity with his work on carnival, when Bakhtin talks
about the heteroglossia of folk and street songs, as ‘sharply opposed to . . .
literary language’ and as ‘parodic’.61 In a clear anticipation of the later
deconstructionist theorists, Bakhtin saw the text ‘as an arena for
a multiplicity of cultural struggles’.62 This work has been productively
taken up by scholars working on ancient fiction, to which we shall return
later in this chapter.63
In the aftermath of Bakhtin, the early modern period has provided
hugely fruitful territory for the study of popular culture. Alongside the
work of (inter alia) Natalie Zemon Davis discussed above, Peter Burke’s
now classic Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (first edition
1978) has been of particular importance, as is clearly reflected in the
work of those seeking to approach ancient popular culture.64 Burke’s
cultural history, as discussed above, takes inspiration from cultural
anthropology, in this case most importantly from the work of Robert
Redfield’s notions of the ‘great’ and ‘little traditions’.65 Burke’s main
thesis is that in early modern Europe there was a culture that was shared,
albeit asymmetrically;66 however, over time, this shared culture became
a revolutionary work of art.’ There is a long-running dispute as to how far we should

understand such ‘rituals of rebellion’ (see here Gluckman 1954) as acting as mere ‘safety valves’,
ultimately preserving the status quo.
59
‘It actually makes little sense to fight out the issue of whether or not carnivals are intrinsically
radical or conservative, for to do so automatically involves the false essentialising of
carnivalesque transgression.’ Stallybrass and White 1986: 14.
60
For instance, Bakhtin described Dostoyevsky’s characters as free to speak in ‘a plurality of
independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid
voices’, rather than being contained by the author: Bakhtin 1984: 6.
61 62
Bakhtin 1981: 273. Lears 1985: 591; LaCapra 1983.
63
Though Peter Burke’s call for historians to pay more attention Bakhtin’s linguistic work is still
relevant: Burke 1988: 90.
64
This work is now in its third edition: Burke 2009.
65
Redfield 1956: 67–104, though Burke 2009: 50 critiques Redfield’s ‘residual’ definition of
popular culture, and notes that it needs to be modified: 55.
66
‘The elite participated in the little tradition, but the common people did not participate in the
great tradition’: Burke 2009: 552.
Introduction 13
divided.67 This is not to say that Burke at any point sees culture as
univocal; rather he stresses ‘unity and diversity’ (to take the title of his
Chapter 2) throughout.
Perhaps most importantly of all for scholarship in the field, Burke’s book
provided a clear and subtle methodology for the investigation of premo-
dern popular culture. In search of such an ‘elusive quarry’ (Burke’s
Chapter 3), even an ‘oblique’ approach (i.e. using the largely elite records
to approach non-elite culture) will not suffice. Firstly, therefore, the his-
torian will need to use the ‘regressive method’, that is, read history
backwards from later periods.68 Secondly, the historian needs to use the
comparative method, utilizing all available material and methodologies,
particularly those of social anthropology. ‘Since the popular culture of early
modern Europe is so elusive, it has to be approached in a roundabout
manner, recovered by indirect means, and interpreted by a series of
analogies.’69 This obviously applies, to an even greater extent, to the
much earlier period covered by this book.70 Burke set out his intention
to deal with ‘the code of popular culture rather than the individual
messages’;71 nonetheless, his book is rich with material on the content of
early modern popular culture, including popular heroes and villains and
the importance of carnival.
While the limited ‘evidence’ available for the study of early modern
popular culture was very cleverly used by Burke, the source materials
available to scholars of earlier periods are even more challenging. This
did not deter Aaron Gurevich from writing his Medieval Popular Culture,
which covered the period from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries.
As Gurevich stresses, this period is very different even from that of the
later Middle Ages and the early modern period when, he argues, ‘popular
culture acquired a definition: it was the culture of the lower social strata in
the process of secularization which also found its expression in written and
printed form’.72 For this early period, what is required, says Gurevich, is
analysis ‘perhaps closest to social anthropology’,73 although his metaphors
are in fact more archaeological: an attempt to ‘dig down’ to the intellectual,
ideational, affective and socio-psychological soil in which culture arose
67
‘the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men – and their wives – had abandoned
popular culture to the lower classes, from whom they were now separated, as never before, by
profound differences in world view’: Burke 2009: 366–7.
68
Here Burke was indebted to the pioneering work of Marc Bloch, e.g. Bloch 1966.
69
Burke 2009: 130.
70
For discussion of Burke’s methodology and its applicability to the ancient world, see Forsdyke
2012: passim and Kurke 2011: 7–8, 22–3.
71
Burke 2009: xiv. 72 Gurevich 1988: xv. 73
Gurevich 1988: xviii.
14 LUCY GRIG
and by which it was sustained’ and as a ‘mental substratum’.74

The influence of Bakhtin is clear: Gurevich is interested in the meeting
point between ‘official’ and popular culture, ‘a complex and contradictory
synthesis which I call a “dialogue-conflict” of the two forms of
consciousness’.75 It is Bakhtin’s work on dialogism that is particularly
important for Gurevich, who sees early medieval clerical texts, such as
those of Caesarius of Arles, as what we might term ‘multivocal’.76
Ultimately, however, the ‘popular culture’ discussed by Gurevich is
palpably more that of the lower clergy than their erstwhile congregations.
Having looked at a wide range of approaches to premodern popular
culture it is now time to turn to our own ancient ‘elusive quarry’.
Approaching Ancient Popular Culture
Accessing popular culture in the ancient world brings its own set of
challenges, alongside those which are familiar from later periods. Not
withstanding the flourishing, as we have seen, of the historical study of
popular culture, ancient historians have been rather slow to turn to the
subject. This in part reflects a general situation whereby ancient historians
tend to be rather late adopters of disciplinary currents that have been
vibrant in other areas of history. Part of the problem lies in the embedded-
ness of ancient history in the field of Classics, in that ancient historians
have often been trained in philology rather than the historical method,77
and can tend to approach their field in something of a historiographical
vacuum. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the fundamentally interdisciplinary
nature of Classics does offer great potential for the possibilities of studying
ancient popular culture in the round, including literary, visual and material
culture.
Social and economic historians have long sought to elucidate the lives of
the non-elites of the Greek and Roman worlds. That this book does not
need to discuss in particular freedmen and women, slaves and aliens of
various types, rather than allowing them to intermix with non-elites, is
down to the many admirable works of previous historians. Nonetheless,
74
Gurevich 1988: xix. 75 Gurevich 1988: xx.
76
Gurevich 1988: 5: ‘The pages of popularizing medieval texts contain an ongoing hidden
dialogue between official doctrine and folkloric consciousness, leading to their convergence but
not to their fusion.’
77
The institutional position of ancient historians does of course vary from country to country,
and there is admittedly something of an Anglo-Saxon bias to this discussion.
Introduction 15
the first dedicated study of ancient popular culture in English78 actually

came from a philologist, well-known as an expert on Virgil. Nicholas
Horsfall’s fascinating short book, The Culture of the Roman Plebs provides
a fascinating window into a
‘parallel’ culture, in its own way rich, varied and robustly vigorous: it has little
enough to do with those literary texts which have bequeathed to us such
a magnificent set of cultural and social blinkers, but rests rather on theatre,
games in various senses, music, songs, dance, memory and has amply demon-
strated its ability to survive almost unaltered at least into late antiquity.79
As this suggests, Horsfall mined the literary corpus with a magpie eye,
unearthing an array of tantalizing snippets of oral culture, embedded into
the more familiar ‘classical’ culture we thought we knew. Song and mem-
ory are central planks of Horsfall’s vision of ancient popular culture, which
is very rich on the topic of the theatre and of performance, though it
otherwise almost entirely neglects the world of the visual.
Roman popular culture has been approached from a more obvious
perspective – that of the social historian – by Jerry Toner, a contributor
to this volume. Toner’s engagement with ancient popular culture began
with his book Leisure and Ancient Rome (1995) but was fully developed in
Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (2009). Toner defines popular culture,
straightforwardly, as ‘the culture of the non-elite’,80 and declares his
intention to analyse this culture ‘on its own terms, on a stand-alone
basis’.81 While Horsfall’s ancient popular culture is rather close to the
‘timeless’ model, at the very least as something enjoying an extremely
longue durée,82 Toner’s is changing and ‘dynamic’.83 In Toner’s account
there is a sense of culture as more than language, as something palpable:
there is an attempt to write ‘sensory history’, including smell, touch and
noise, although the visual is again absent.84 Popular culture appears most
often as a coping strategy (or rather a series of coping strategies) through
which the non-elite faced the difficult world they lived in. This study is
much more politically and theoretically attuned than that of Horsfall, for
instance employing the work of Bakhtin, Scott and Thompson to look at
the ‘carnivalesque’ and popular resistance.85
Ancient Greek popular culture, too, has recently come under sustained
examination in two recent monographs. First is Leslie Kurke’s Aesopic
78
The work of Pedro Paulo Funari constitutes an important exception: see Funari 1989, with
some of its key ideas recapitulated in English in Funari 1993.
79
Horsfall 2003: 66–7. 80 Toner 2009: 1. 81
Toner 2009: 5. 82 Horsfall 2003: 23–5.
83 84
Toner 2009: 7. Toner 2009: esp. 123–61 (ch. 4: ‘Common scents, common senses’).
85
Toner 2009: 92–122, 162–84 (ch. 3: ‘The world turned bottom up’ and ch. 5: ‘Popular resistance’).
16 LUCY GRIG
Conversations (2011), even though Kurke herself states that the term is
‘probably . . . a misnomer’ for the ancient world.86 Kurke takes the Life of
Aesop as her starting point.87 Refreshingly for a work of classical scholar-
ship, this author is upfront about ‘a methodology that starts from cultural
history, anthropology, and structuralist and poststructuralist literary and
cultural theory’. The theoretical inventory is quite striking88 and debts to
this rich vein of theory are often explicit, as when Kurke states:
Aesop, like other folkloric trickster figures in other cultural traditions, enabled or
gave voice to power and inequitable power relations from below. In these terms,
Aesop was a mobile figure within the common or ‘little’ cultural tradition in which
nonelite and elite participated together, but a figure generally banned or excluded
from elite high culture. As such, stories about Aesop should give us unique access
to the rifts and tensions within Greek culture – divergent views, counterideologies,
and resistances to all kinds of hegemonic positions, encoded in narrative form.89
Kurke argues that Aesop give us access to a dialogue between ‘high’ and
‘low’ and that we should see the Life as ‘the layered bricolage of multiple
acts and agents’.90 However, in the end she chooses to pinpoint one
particular origin for the text, back in the fifth century BCE.91
A search for origins is also carried out by Sara Forsdyke’s Slaves Tell
Tales, and Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient
Greece (2012), though in this case the layers of elite texts are unpeeled in
the search for a ‘popular’ core. Forsdyke, like Kurke, is keen to use
theoretical, and particularly comparative, literature as a crucial tool.
In fact, Forsdyke’s method is explicitly to interpret ancient popular culture
through the use of models taken from scholarship outside the classical
world.92 Hence Herodotus’ account of the strange reforms of Cleisthenes
of Sicyon is interpreted in a highly Bakhtinian fashion,93 while Plutarch’s
account of rioting in sixth-century BCE Megara is interpreted with early
modern carnival in mind.94 Forsdyke’s picture of ancient Greek popular
culture is more obviously political than Kurke’s,95 with more than a nod to
Subaltern Studies, concluding, ‘To borrow a phrase from James Scott,
86
Kurke 2011: 7. 87 Discussed further below; see also Jennings, Chapter 9 in this volume.
88
Kurke 2011: 23, including Althusser, Bourdieu, Certeau, Gramsci, Stallybrass and White and
J. C. Scott, as well as Peter Burke and Robert Redfield.
89 90
Kurke 2011: 53. Kurke 2011: 25.
91
Whitmarsh 2011 aptly points out that in this way Kurke’s study becomes much less radical, and
more like a traditional study of literary history.
92 93
Forsdyke 2012: 49. Forsdyke 2012: 90–113. 94 Forsdyke 2012: 117–43, esp. 134–7.
95
Forsdyke 2012 begins with a quote from Eric Hobsbawm (3) and invokes the relationship
between popular culture and politics as a key theme of book: 11–14.
Introduction 17
popular culture was, and continues to be, “a weapon of the weak”.’96 What
her study does reveal, however, is the difficulty of reconstructing ‘the
people’ on the available evidence: the popular communities whose cultures
are imagined by Forsdyke remain rather obscure in their social and eco-
nomic position and identity. In this volume, Mirko Canevaro’s chapter
provides a critique of Forsdyke’s book, arguing that the ‘official’ culture of
democratic Athens was in fact ‘popular’.
These works show that scholarly interest in ancient popular culture is
burgeoning, but also reveal that there is still much work to be done. A truly
interdisciplinary examination of ancient popular culture is required, one
that applies diachronic, as well as synchronic analysis. A sceptical social
historian, for instance, might wish to seek more clarity about who exactly
were ‘the people’ at stake in a history of popular culture. Forsdyke’s, as we
saw, were decidedly obscure. Jerry Toner sensibly admits that:
The non-elite were too great a hotchpotch of differing groups to be united by a single,
monolithic culture. They inhabited a complex world of different geographies, wealth
and status levels that meant that no uniform way of life could ever exist.97
The various cleavages involved include such polarities as slave/free, citizen/

non-citizen, male/female, adult/child, urban/rural. The differences
between Greece and Rome also need flagging up clearly at this point.
The picture of the culture of the Roman non-elite is clearer in scholarship
not just due to the vast disparities in available evidence, but also arguably
because of the strikingly different degrees of inequality between Greece and
Rome, i.e. the different degrees of subalternity. With these caveats in mind,
it is necessary to consider a brief picture of the social world in which our
putative popular culture was embedded.
A still prevalent scholarly picture of classical Greece depicts a highly
polarized society, in which a wealthy leisured elite (hoi plousioi) making up
not even 5 per cent of the population98 are to be contrasted with the non-elite
mass, characterized as poor (hoi penetes). How far we can properly trace
a middle class (Aristotle’s hoi mesoi: Pol. 1295b) is a moot point: clearly
Athenian society, like all societies, had gradations of wealth and social status,
but they are hard to specify historically, though a clear hint comes from the
existence of the three traditional military classes: hippeis, hoplites and thetes.
Current scholarship is slowly edging towards a more nuanced picture of
Athenian society, stressing that Athenian citizens at least enjoyed levels of
96 97
Forsdyke 2012: 178. Toner 2009: 2.
98
The figures are derived from the eligibility to pay liturgies in Athens: only c. 1,200 citizens, an
estimated 4 per cent of the citizen population, paid them: see Canevaro’s chapter below, p. 47.
18 LUCY GRIG
inequality that were very low indeed in comparison to other premodern

(and even modern) states.99 Nonetheless, in the absence of clear economic
and archaeological data on the one hand, and a hugely ideologically
skewed literary tradition on the other, the situation is still cloudy.
The citizen famers of Attica certainly do not fit the stereotype of the
downtrodden, subaltern peasant;100 most notably, in common with other
‘poor’ Athenians, they typically owned slaves, and they also participated in
politics.101 While the life of the farmer was respected in elite discourse,102
manual labour of other kinds was despised as banausic, so degrading,
although of course many, if not most, of the banausoi were citizens.103
The urban non-elite (though crucially made up of foreigners, slaves and ex-
slaves alongside citizens), traders and craftsmen of various kinds were
consistently treated in pejorative terms as dishonest and low.104
Even in the vastly better-documented case of ancient Rome it remains
tricky to produce a properly complex picture of Roman society. It is clear
we need to avoid viewing Roman society in terms of a tiny ‘elite’ atop
a huge, non-differentiated ‘non-elite’.105 The social stratification of the
Roman non-elite,106 comprising complex and overlapping social and eco-
nomic statuses, is too broad a subject to deal with here in any but the most
sweeping of terms,107 although individual chapters of the book do take up
the challenge.108 That the populus of Rome, for example, cannot be shown
as a coherent group is shown by Cyril Courrier’s chapter, which takes an
99
See, most strikingly, Ober 2015: esp. 71–100 as well as Kron 2011, using evidence for eligibility
for liturgies.
100
Bresson 2007: 150 stresses the inequality of land tenure, but the evidential basis for his
estimated figures is far from secure. The use of the term ‘peasant’ for Athenian citizens has
been debated, but is plausibly defended by Cartledge 1993: 132.
101
The two are connected: that slave-owning gave peasant citizens time to participate in politics is
now largely accepted. See Jameson 1977–8, though refuted by Wood 1988: esp. ch. 2. Literary
evidence does depict the ‘poor’ owning slaves, e.g. the poor famer Chremylos in Aristophanes’
Ploutos owns several slaves: 228, 1105.
102
Dover 1974: 112–14.
103
E.g. Arist. Pol. 1337 b7: ‘We therefore call mechanical those skills which have a deleterious
effect on the body’s condition, and all work that is paid for’; see here Dover 1974: 40 on the
contempt for economic dependency.
104
Xenophon, albeit a clearly problematic witness, claimed that the Assembly was made up of
‘fullers, cobblers, carpenters, blacksmiths, farmers, and traders’: Memorabilia 3.7.6.
105
Alföldy’s famous schematic depiction of Roman society as a pyramid (Alföld 1988: fig. 1)
avoids this caricature, though it is still understandably oversimplified. See, for an interesting
attempt to provide a more nuanced picture of social stratification, Jones 2009.
106
Again, it can only be very briefly pointed out that the Roman elite, too, was itself stratified: see,
for a thoughtful discussion, Brown 2000b.
107
Mayer 2012 takes up the challenge to identify an ancient middle class, though his arguments
have not been met with universal acceptance.
108
See here, too, Purcell 1994.
Introduction 19
illuminating look at the plebs urbana. The question of social status in the
Roman world as a whole became more and more complex over time.109
We might think, for instance, of the ambiguity and contradictions involved
in the status of the freedman or woman. The Empire-wide grant of citizen-
ship made by Caracalla in 212 resulted in the devaluation of citizenship,
and ultimately new levels of distinction or differentiation: legal evidence
shows a deepening distinction between the treatment of honestiores and
humiliores in Late Antiquity.110 What is clear is that the Roman world, in
especially marked contrast to the classical Greek period, combined striking
levels of social mobility alongside equally striking levels of social and
economic inequality.
While considering the complex social positioning of ancient popular
culture we also need to consider its location. As ever, the nature of our source
material will tend to bias urban over rural settings, despite the clear inter-
dependence of town and countryside in the ancient world, not to mention
the great numerical preponderance of peasants.111 The city appears, in
scholarship at least, to be the most natural locus for the development of
a rich popular culture, due to the density of population, the prominence of
horizontal as well as vertical associations, and the multiplicity of many key
institutions and structures such as public entertainments, religious buildings
and political bodies.112 Courrier, Cristina Rosillo-López and Alexandre
Vincent all deal with the fascinating caput mundi in their chapters. Vincent
deals with the subjection of city-dwellers of all classes to hegemonic culture in
the case of the ‘sounds of power’. He reminds us that public and even private
urban space was dominated by what we can only see as top-down delivery of
decibels. High levels of urbanization in North Africa, meanwhile, allowed for
popular channels of communication and protest, as discussed by Julio-Cesar
Magalhães de Oliveira. Towns and cities also provide the locations for the
sermons of the famous preachers of Late Antiquity, whose texts provide such
crucial evidence for social and cultural history, as studied by Jaclyn Maxwell.
However, the late antique source material for the Kalends of January, as
discussed in my own chapter, makes it clear that it had both urban and rural
components, reminding us that ancient cities were inextricably connected
with their rural hinterlands.113
109 110
For a helpful discussion, see Peachin 2011: 3–36. See here still Garnsey 1970.
111
Grey 2011: 5 suggests that peasants made up ‘something over eighty percent’ of the population
of the ancient Mediterranean.
112
Horsfall’s culture of the Roman plebs, for instance, appears almost entirely urban.
113
See Klingshirn 1994: 208–9, citing Kroeber: ‘the peasant society of sixth-century Arles was
a “part-society” with a “part-culture”’.
20 LUCY GRIG
Accessing the rural, peasant cultures114 of ancient Greece and Rome

requires particular methodological complexity, and detective work in
order to shed light on a particularly recalcitrant evidential base.115
Anthropological and comparative as well as archaeological studies are
obviously crucial.116 In the meantime rural popular culture in the guise
of ‘folk culture’ has been the often-idealized focus of scholarship since
Herder, who favoured a ‘pure’ peasantry, declaring ‘The people are not the
mob of the streets, who never sing or compose but shriek and mutilate.’117
The timeless, traditional nature of peasant culture continues to feature in
modern scholarship,118 although peasant studies have also felt significant
impact from subaltern and postcolonial studies.119
Just as urban popular culture is easier to access than its rural counterpart, so
too popular culture is much more visible in the public than the private sphere.
The household as locus for popular culture is considered in April Pudsey’s
chapter, which looks at children. The idea that children and young people
have their own subordinate, alternative culture is one that clearly demands
more historiographical attention.120 In general, in this volume we are keen to
encourage the study of new, less thronged avenues of study, pursuing both
new types of source and new types of history. This includes, for instance,
tackling the growing field of sensory history, such as Vincent’s discussion of
the history of sound.121 It also involves taking the history of popular culture
beyond the obvious, clichéd areas, such as the now well-known ‘lower bodily
stratum’. There is more to popular culture than fart jokes and rioting over
food prices; in this sense, Toner’s and Maxwell’s serious studies of popular
intellectual life represent clear advances in scholarship.
114
Note the caveats discussed above in the case of Greece. A useful ‘minimal’ definition of
a ‘peasant’ is suggested by Grey 2011: 29: ‘settled cultivators, whose agricultural exploitation
was essentially for subsistence, who performed agricultural tasks personally and controlled
their own labour and land’.
115
See Forsdyke 2012: passim.
116
For a fascinating example of what can be done, here for the late antique period, see Dossey
2010 and Grey 2011. The Roman Peasant Project, directed by Kim Bowes represents an
important step forward: see www.sas.upenn.edu/romanpeasants/index.html, including
preliminary reports.
117
Cited in Burke 2009: 47.
118
E.g. Klingshirn 1994: 208–9, apropos of the countryside surrounding Arles: ‘Where peasant
culture diverged from urban culture was above all in its traditional way of life, which survived
because of its proven value for success.’
119
See Bernstein and Byres 2001, reflecting on the discipline of ‘peasant studies’: esp. 6–8 on
‘peasantness’.
120
Laes and Vuolanto forthcoming.
121
See Vincent’s chapter for bibliography. On sensory history and popular culture, particularly
smell, see Toner 2009: 123–61, and note Toner 2014.
Introduction 21
Having highlighted some of the aspects of popular culture to be dealt

with here, the final section of this chapter will take a more sustained look at
some of the most important areas of this field. While the volume makes no
claim to comprehensiveness, this section will nonetheless round out the
picture of ancient popular culture by highlighting several key areas that
constitute popular culture: religion, literature, art and politics.
Key Themes in Ancient Popular Culture
The subject of ‘popular religion’, unlike other areas of ‘popular culture’ in

the ancient world (and the Middle Ages) has long been on the scholarly
agenda.122 Indeed, in the case of the Middle Ages the study of medieval
popular culture tends to blend into the study of medieval popular religion:
here an influential ‘two cultures’ model has been suggested, configured out
of various different binary opposites: clerical versus lay, learned versus
‘folkloric’, ‘literate’ versus ‘oral’.123 The very term ‘popular religion’ mean-
while remains highly vexed, having been used widely as part of a discourse
which has sought to divide respectable, proper religion from its lesser
‘popular’ counterpart.124 Robert Scribner provided a helpful starting
point for definition and analysis in the case of Christianity:
popular religion is not a fixed category or set of practices, but something which has
a continuing dynamic which occurs in two ways: both as developing practice and in
relationship to the institutional church.125
Of course, in the case of the ancient world our investigation is made all the
more challenging by the fact that ‘popular religion’ needs to be investigated
across a particularly diverse religious landscape, encompassing polytheistic
as well as monotheistic religions. The position of ‘popular’ or ‘non-official’
religion is clearly very different in a religious system that is highly centra-
lized and defined by a standard set of doctrines and text,126 as opposed to
a system characterized by openness and diversity (albeit within limits).
122
The bibliography is correspondingly large: a good starting point for Late Antiquity is
Frankfurter 2005; Davis 1974 is still relevant; and see further Künzel 1992 and Schmitt 1976.
123
Le Goff’s idea of the ‘two cultures’ was laid out most fully in Le Goff 1977; his work has been
much criticized, e.g. by Robert Markus, who notes that Le Goff has only really transposed
traditional dichotomies ‘from a religious into a cultural register’: Markus 1990: 11–12. See
p. 250 for further references.
124
To ‘separate the grain from the chaff’ in the words of Davis 1974: 307.
125
Scribner 1987: 44.
126
The history of Christianity has suffered most obviously from an institutional bias: see here, for
an interesting corrective, the recent People’s History of Christianity series, seeking to offer
22 LUCY GRIG
Indeed, the very concept of ‘religion’ is increasingly seen as problematic

and anachronistic in the case of the ancient world.127
One attempt to locate ‘popular’ ancient religion might well be socio-
logical, i.e. asking if certain religious practices and cults were more likely to
appeal to non-elites than others. Generally, long-held notions here fall
apart under closer scrutiny. For instance, scholars have often maintained
that the cult of Isis was most closely identified with the socially margin-
alized, for slaves, freedmen, foreigners and women. Detailed epigraphic
studies, however, have largely destroyed this notion. In Pompeii, for
instance, where we have the most detailed evidence, the local elite played
key roles in the cult.128 Further afield, likewise, epigraphic data show that
there were devotees across all social classes in the Roman world, with just
as many ingenui as freedmen and slaves.129 Notions about the ‘popular’
nature of this cult are thus shown to be based on outdated and condescend-
ing notions.130
One of the key concepts in discussions of popular religion both ancient
and modern is that of ‘superstition’: deisidaimonia in Greek and superstitio
in Latin. Neither term is of course an exact definition of the term: the Greek
denotes a range of meanings, from (excessive) fear of the gods, to piety
(with something like our ‘superstition’ in there too). Theophrastus’ ‘super-
stitious man’, for instance, seems recognizable:
The superstitious man is the sort who < . . ..> washes his hands, sprinkles himself
with water from a shrine, puts a sprig of laurel in his mouth and walks around that
way all day. If a weasel crosses his path he goes no further until someone passes
between them, or he throws three stones over the road. If he sees a snake in his
house he invokes Sabazios if it is a reddish-brown one, but if it is a holy one he
immediately founds a hero shrine on the spot.131
Plutarch’s notion of superstition also involves excessive fear of the gods; his
version of the superstitious man goes in for ‘magic charms and spells,
rushing about and beating of drums, impure purifications and unclean
sanctifications, barbarous and outlandish penances and mortifications at
a history of the people, rather than ‘the hierarchical-institutional-bureaucratic corporation’:

Burrus 2005: xiii.
127
On the emergence of the concept of religion, see now Nongbri 2013.
128
The temple of Isis at Pompeii was the first and only complete temple restoration in the
aftermath of the earthquake of 63 CE, suggesting the local prominence and prestige of the cult
and a high level of involvement of the decurion class; see still Tran Tam Tinh 1964.
129
See here Malaise 1972 and Takács 1995.
130
A similar characterization of the early adherents of Christianity, once common in scholarship,
is now generally rejected.
131
Theophrastus, Char. 16.1–4.
Introduction 23
the shrines’.132 Polybius however, in his discussion of the Roman constitu-

tion famously remarked that the Romans as a whole were distinguished by
their deisidaimonia whereby fear of the gods meant that the Romans,
unlike the Greeks, kept their faith.133
The relevant Latin term is rather less ambiguous, consistently denoting
the wrong kind of religion: superstitio versus religio.134 Like the Greek, the
Latin term includes the idea of an excessive religiosity, but also denotes,
more sharply, the idea of irregular (even dangerously so) religious practice.
This division, between religio and superstitio can be seen as a starting point
for the religious self-definition of the Roman elite, who set boundaries
between the legitimate and illegitimate, ‘us’ and ‘them’, including the
identification of a set of transgressive religious stereotypes against whom
they set themselves.135 Superstitio was most likely to be attributed to people
the elite felt most superior to: the poor, women (especially elderly ones)
and foreigners.136 These people, excluded from the processes of state,
posed structural problems, and were thus frequently seen as subversive,
deviant, or as demons and witches. The classic case in point in ancient
Rome is of course that of the suppression of Bacchic cult in the second
century BCE, just as much later in Europe women were focused upon as
witches. Meanwhile, with the expansion of empire, especially from
the second century CE onwards, the beliefs of foreign people were increas-
ingly described (and attacked) as superstitio, most strikingly those of
Druids, Egyptians and Jews, as the Roman elite sought to define their
superiority vis-à-vis provincial elites.137 A growing focus on magic as the
132
Mor. 171B.
133
Polybius 6.56.7; it is striking that Polybius treats Roman religion as a device for manipulating
the masses, although he actually attributes the same behaviour to Roman magistrates, i.e. the
elite.
134
For instance, religio honours the gods, superstitio wrongs them: Seneca, De Clementia 2.5.1
In Greek there is a polarity between deisidaimonia and theosebeia or eusebeia, but it is less
striking and less common.
135
Beard, North and Price 1998: 215.
136
Christianity of course was regarded as a particularly pernicious superstitio. Though in fact
a Christian caricature of anti-Christian polemic, this description is telling: ‘They have collected
from the absolute dregs of society the ill-educated and the women, who tend because of their
sex to be more credulous and unstable, and have created a rabble of blasphemous conspirators,
which is bound together by nocturnal gatherings, ritual fasts and unnatural feasts, not for any
rite but for profanation. They form a secretive people that shuns the light, silent in public,
talkative in corners, they despise temples as being only tombs, they spit on the gods, they mock
our rites, these pitiful people pity (incredible though it is) our priests, they despise public
offices and their purple robes, while they themselves go half-naked’: Minucius Felix,
Octavius 8.4.
137
E.g. Tacitus on the superstitio of the Druids (Hist. 4.54.4) and the people of Alexandria (Hist.
4.81.2); see here Beard, North and Price 1998: 211–44, esp. 217, 221–2, 227, and Gordon 1990.
24 LUCY GRIG
ultimate superstitio also developed, particularly in the fourth century CE

and thereafter. In a striking ideological takeover, meanwhile, Christians
inherited, and made their own, the distinction between religio and super-
stitio and this new Christian dichotomy would ultimately be even more
powerful.138
While ‘superstition’ is clearly a term to be avoided, the utility of the
concept of ‘popular religion’ is maintained by a number of scholars. In his
Athenian Popular Religion, John Mikalson clearly states that he is not using
the term in a social (i.e. lower class) or pejorative sense, but argues that it
designates the religious views and attitudes and activities shared by ‘the
majority of Athenians’ and ‘the common cultural experience of the
Athenians’,139 stressing consensus and homogeneity.140 In the case of Late
Antiquity, Ramsay MacMullen has recently sought to reclaim the notion of
popular Christianity, with his book The Second Church. He argues, in
a manner reminiscent of Le Goff, that there were ‘two Christianities’, the
first representing ‘the Establishment: ecclesiastical leadership, councils and
theology, scriptural citations . . .. clergy . . . chanting . . . a laity almost wholly
recruited from the local aristocracy’ and a second: ‘the 95 per cent, worship-
ing in their own way’.141 MacMullen is thus unrepentant about his famous
claim that church congregations were made up of only of the social elite
(estimated more precisely here at 5 per cent).142 The 95 per cent meanwhile,
according to MacMullen, worshipped in their own ways, ‘outside the walls’,
particularly in funerary basilicas. Martyr cult, for MacMullen, provided
just about the only opportunity for a rapprochement of the ‘two
Christianities’.143 Scholars wishing to highlight the agency of the ‘people’
in ancient history will doubtless sympathize with MacMullen’s determina-
tion not to occlude their religious practices from the record, but we might
doubt the subtlety of his methodology.144
MacMullen is reacting against the influential work of Peter Brown, who
powerfully attacked pejorative notions of ‘popular religion’ in his seminal
138
Nicely put by Momigliano 1972: 11: ‘The Christians . . . set up their palisade between religion
and superstition to coincide with the frontier between Christianity and Paganism.’
139
Mikalson 1983: 5.
140
Mikalson 1983: 107. Cf. Victoria Jennings’ discussion of ancient popular religion in Chapter 9
below.
141
MacMullen 2009: 110. 142 MacMullen 1989 versus Allen 1996.
143
MacMullen 2009: 108.
144
Counting the number of places available in churches, MacMullen estimates, based on 255
churches in 125 towns and cities, that attendance at church could have included only between
1 and 8 per cent of the population: 2009: 101. A comparison with the seating provided by the
medieval church (or another period of history) would surely be crucial here; the estimates, in
any case, provide a rather a blunt tool for analysis of this kind.
Introduction 25
work The Cult of the Saints. Brown showed how a historiographical legacy,
which he traced back as far as David Hume’s essay The Natural History of
Religion, has bedevilled analysis of Christian religion in particular.145
Brown demonstrated that Hume’s attack on the religious failures of ‘the
vulgar’ had its heirs in an enduring ‘two-tiered’ model of religion, opposing
the enlightened views of the elites to the limitations of the ‘vulgar’ masses.
Whether it is presented, bluntly, as “popular superstition” or categorized as “lower
forms of belief”, it is assumed that “popular religion” exhibits modes of thinking and
worshiping that are best intelligible in terms of a failure to be something else.146
Moreover, and crucially, Brown lucidly pointed out how scholarship had
consistently understood ‘popular religion’ ‘from the view-point of the
elite’.147 The aim of this book, of course, is precisely to avoid taking a top-
down view of ancient culture. In this context we can place Maxwell’s
chapter, which takes non-elite religion seriously, showing ‘there was no
clear distinction between theology and popular religion’.148
Most scholars working in the field of late antique religion today continue
to critique the concept of popular religion from one angle or another.
David Frankfurter, writing about Roman Egypt, argues that the concept of
‘local religion’149 is more fruitful:
Within (or at least in the context of) local religion one can accommodate and
highlight the important continuities in religious practice between socioeconomic
classes, a problem that previous constructions of ‘popular religion’ have been
unable to negotiate.150
Frankfurter, like others, draws on the approach of Redfield, stressing the

interaction between the ‘great’ tradition (Greco-Roman civic religion,
temple religion), interacting with a ‘little’ tradition (local religions and
cultures). He is determined that we take this local religion seriously, not as
‘irrelevant veneers’ on a general piety, but rather as ‘idioms through which
local religions and cultures can articulate their worlds’.151 This idea of
145
Brown 1981: 12–122. 146 Brown 1981: 19.
147
Brown 1981: 19. In a now classic article Momigliano argued forcefully that the notion of
‘popular religion’ is an invention of Christianity, though he himself retains something of the
views criticized by Brown, e.g. writing of ‘the Christian abolition of the internal frontiers
between the learned and the vulgar’: Momigliano 1972: 17.
148
E.g., as David Frankfurter observes, ‘the devotions of the poor and uneducated typically come
off as a soup of magic, crisis rites, image worship, festival hilarity and superstition in contrast
to the staid and rational religion ascribed to the upper classes’: Frankfurter 2005: 255–6. See
Maxwell in this volume, p. 297.
149
As formulated by Christian 1981 for the case of early modern Spain.
150 151
Frankfurter 1998: 34. Frankfurter 1998: 6.
26 LUCY GRIG
religion as world-constructing is clearly crucial in any analysis of religion

as part of popular culture.152
Looking at ‘lived’ or ‘quotidian’ religion, the approach taken by Nicola
Denzey Lewis in her chapter153 brings about similarly rich findings.
It can be argued that ‘lived religion’ is a particularly appropriate approach
for ancient religion, which is so demonstrably embedded in culture, as
well as for the desire to investigate religion as part of popular culture.154
It is in this sense that we can consider a huge range of activities, both
public and private, to which we have access via a wonderful selection of
source material, particularly from material culture. Do-it-yourself oracles
are explored by Lewis, Jennings and Toner. The rubbish dumps of
Oxyrhynchus have yielded a number of examples of papyrus slips which
were used to ask questions of the gods: the individual would hand in two
slips of papyrus, asking positive and negative versions of the same question.
The god would ‘choose’ the answer, and the appropriate slip would be
handed back. Surviving examples suggest that on occasions temple
scribes were taking dictation, while on others the spelling and script
suggest that individuals wrote their own. The gods addressed in this way
included the falcon god Thonisis but also, later, the ‘God of our protector
St Philoxenos’.155 As Lewis has shown, meanwhile, the catacombs of Rome
have yielded many more interesting and varied objects of apotropaic and
other significance than the official narratives of early Christian archaeology
would suggest.
Lived, embedded religion also involves the very many festivals and
celebrations both small, and large scale, that dotted and marked the year
in the ancient world.156 Chapter 11 looks at one such festival, the Kalends
of January, that existed both on the official, ‘top-down’ level and on a much
more local level, involving practices that were frequently targeted by the
ecclesiastical authorities in Late Antiquity. The Kalends is just one of
a number of festivals which could be considered to embrace particularly
‘popular’ themes, the most obvious being Saturnalia (the Greek Kronia)
152
See here Davis 1974: 314, citing Geertz 1973: 87–125, a seminal discussion of religion as
a cultural system. However, we should also note the critique of Asad 1983, reminding us that
religion is created and defined by ‘authorising discourses’: 244; ‘power create[s] religion’: 252;
see here too Arnold 2005: 6–19.
153
See here Orsi 1997 and the discussion in Lewis’ chapter.
154
Frankfurter 2005: 268 reminds us of the need to embed our accounts of religious practices in
their particular social contexts, which will enable us to see religious ritual acts as ‘embedded in
real social worlds and tensions’, rather than labelling them as ‘magic’ or ‘superstitious’: 270.
155
Parsons 2007: 175–6; PGMP8b. See pp. 186–7 for oracles discussed by Toner.
156
Scullard 1981 remains the best guide to Roman festivals; see also Versnel 1994.
Introduction 27
frequently compared to carnival, and interpreted along Bakhtinian lines.157

In Greece festivals celebrating Dionysus and Demeter, for instance, were
known for aischrologia, the shouting of obscene and abusive remarks, as
well as for gender inversion.158
These festivals, of course, lie at the heart of one of the most important
genres of ancient literature, that is, Greek comedy, the subject of James
Robson’s chapter. Aristophanes’ plays, superficially at least, seem to offer the
potential for accessing Greek popular culture: characters drawn from across
a broad range of society, earthy language and humour, and often an appar-
ently anti-establishment stance. Yet of course it is only with some difficulty
that Aristophanes’ plays can be truly identified as part of popular culture. His
plays were early on claimed as part of the canon, and it is problematic to
claim that they take a generally oppositional stance.159 Nonetheless, ancient
theatre, and comedy in particular, does constitute an obvious area for what
we might see in Bakhtinian terms as the interpenetration of high and low
culture. Nowhere is this more visible than in the case of the Roman mime.
Mime was despised by the Roman elite as a definitely ‘low’ form and the very
vitriol it attracted makes it a particularly good place to look for what we
might call ‘unauthorized culture’, even for subaltern, oppositional voices.160
Indeed, the Roman mime seems to have staged challenges to the dominant
social order, hence its terrible reputation among elite critics.161 The problem
with reconstructing the ancient mime, however, lies in its improvised nature
so that its textual traces are tantalizingly few.162
A quick glimpse at the history of scholarship on the ancient novel
highlights the problems faced when examining the extant textual tradition.
While earlier generations of scholars wished to see the ancient novels as
‘low-brow’ popular literature,163 modern scholarship sees them very much
as elite texts, often engaged in defining elite culture.164 Once the Cinderella
157
See Chapter 11 in this volume for bibliography. See also, on festive revelry, Forsdyke 2012:
124–43.
158
For references and bibliography see Forsdyke 2012: 126, 130.
159
Ste. Croix 1972 influentially argued for the conservative nature of Old Comedy; see esp.
355–71, although note the caveats expressed by Pritchard 2012. See Robson’s chapter for
further bibliography.
160
Note briefly for introductions, Fantham 1989 and Panayotakis 2005.
161
We might wish to contrast here the more ‘authorized’ Roman comedy of Plautus, which
nonetheless liked to play at imagining challenges to the established order, particularly in the
case of the master/slave relationship: see here McCarthy 2000.
162
Herodas’ ‘literary’ mime remains highly suggestive: see briefly Arnott 1971, Esposito 2010.
163
E.g. Perry 1967: 98 as cited above; see Bowie 1994 for a useful survey of earlier views.
164
E.g. Whitmarsh 2008c: esp. 72–4; there were nonetheless clear distinctions between the novels
‘in terms of literary and stylistic elaboration’, e.g. Hunter 2008: 265. Hofmann’s definition is
interesting: ‘It certainly was a consumer literature but not a mass literature’: Hofmann 1999: 6.
28 LUCY GRIG
of classical literature, since the 1980s the Greek novel has undergone
a startling renaissance in scholarship. Formerly popular ideas of these
texts as ‘proto-bourgeois’, or as intended for female readers, have given
way to much more theoretically informed and complex readings.165 Does it
make any sense to call them popular? A striking study counting surviving
fragments of ancient literary papyri showed the ancient novel to be far less
‘popular’ (that is, in quantitative terms) than many more canonical works:
we certainly need to move beyond approaches that try to assess the
‘popular’ status of a given text on the basis of wide distribution.166 What
else would make them popular? Attempting to define a distinctively pop-
ular literary aesthetic (for instance, positing the primacy of content over
form) is problematic.167 As so often in the study of popular culture, one
possibility is to look to Bakhtin, who stressed the multivocality of the
(ancient) novel.168 This works better yet if we expand our view of ancient
fiction.
The ‘classic’ Greek novels of course made up just part of a much broader
genre of ‘ancient prose fiction’, which includes texts such as the Alexander
Romance, the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and other Christian hagio-
graphical works, Jewish narratives, and other works such as the Life of
Aesop.169 This last text is perhaps particularly rich for scholars working
on popular culture, as is clearly demonstrated by Victoria Jennings’ chap-
ter. Related features that might most likely be associated with putatively
popular texts are, as Jennings has it, ‘“openness” . . . “non-canonicity”,
“textual fluidity”’; moreover ‘it is likely that their non-textual distribution –
their audience and their “consumption” – was considerably broader than
text-qua-text transmission can suggest’. A purely text-based approach is in
any case highly problematic in a culture with such a high degree of orality.
At this point it is necessary to pause and consider issues of orality and
literacy in the ancient world. Pessimistic estimates of literacy were influen-
tially, if controversially, laid out by William Harris, who has declared,
forcefully:
165
The bibliography is huge but see, for instance, the essays collected in Karla 2009a, Whitmarsh
2008a, Whitmarsh and Thomson 2013.
166
In quantitative terms ancient novels clearly were not the most ‘popular’ form of literature:
papyrus fragments from Oxyrhynchus put novels far below Homer, lyric and drama:
‘The conclusion seems to me inescapable that the novels were not popular with the denizens of
Greco-Roman Egypt – Christian or otherwise’: Stephens 1994: esp. 414.
167
Hansen 1998: xiv–xv cites Bourdieu 1984 on the issue of the ‘popular aesthetic’, while
attempting to define ancient Greek ‘popular literature’.
168
Bakhtin 1981.
169
See, for discussions of a wide range of texts, Whitmarsh and Thomson 2013, Hofmann 1999;
for Christian fiction in particular, see Perkins 1995.
Introduction 29
there was no mass literacy, and even the level which I have called craftsmen’s
literacy was achieved only in certain limited milieux. The classical world, even at its
most advanced, was so lacking in the characteristics which produce extensive
literacy that we must suppose that the majority of people were always illiterate.170
What levels of literacy are we talking about? Rates obviously varied greatly
according to both chronology and geography; Harris estimated ‘below
15 per cent’ over all,171 with higher rates from Rome and Italy, though
still ‘well below 20–30 per cent’.172 Harris’s pessimistic rejection of the very
possibility of mass literacy has not, of course, gone unchallenged.173 In any
case, this is not an area where much generalization is helpful: rates of
literacy seem to have been much higher in classical Greece than in ancient
Rome.174 High rates of literacy in Athens are suggested by a range of
evidence, from the practice of ostracism to the large number of extant
rupestral inscriptions in rural areas, including the fascinating example of
a poem in Homeric metre inscribed on a rock by a shepherd.175 The writing
of metrical poetry clearly takes us far beyond a purely ‘functional’ literacy
and suggests that previous estimates, at least for ancient Greece, have
been too pessimistic. Meanwhile, however, it is no longer thought that
Christianity involved any particular predilection for literacy,176 and indeed
a late antique decline in literacy is likely.177
This is not to say that we should imagine a great gulf between the literate
and non-literate worlds. Recent scholarship, particularly on classical
Greece, has stressed the interplay between written and oral communica-
tion, with the nature of the interaction being shaped by the specific con-
ditions of a given culture. Rosalind Thomas in particular has stressed the
importance of oral tradition and communal memory in classical Greece
well into the fourth century BCE.178 Meanwhile interest in the relationship
between literacy and the development of Greek democracy continues,
although more recent work rejects a simple causal relationship between the
two.179 For ancient Rome, meanwhile, the work of Peter Wiseman (the title
of one book, Unwritten Rome is indicative) has stressed the importance of
170 171 172

Harris 1989: 13. Harris 1989: 267. Harris 1989: 259.
173
See Humphrey 1991 for an interesting range of responses and challenges to Harris’s account,
including Corbier 1991, discussing evidence for lower-class literacy.
174
Nonetheless, debate continues regarding its extent: divergent views in recent scholarship can
be found, for instance, in Missiou 2011 versus Thomas 2009. Harris argues for greater rates of
literacy in Hellenistic compared to classical Greece: Harris 1989: 329.
175
See Goette 1994: esp. 124–8.
176
On the interface between orality and literacy in early Christianity, see Grig 2013a.
177 178
See Harris 1989: 321–2. See, in particular, Thomas 1989 and 1992.
179
See here Missiou 2011.
30 LUCY GRIG
performance and story-telling in the transmission of Roman historiogra-

phy, particularly in the Early and Mid Republic.180 Meanwhile, as we have
already seen, Nicholas Horsfall has shown just how important memory,
performance and song were in communicating culture.181
It is clearly much more productive to think of literature that goes beyond
literary texts. This involves taking in oral elements: story-telling, drama
and performance of all kinds and tracing their presence in the surviving
texts we do have (and of course, some types of texts are more likely to have
these traces than others). Again, as Jennings suggests ‘It seems likely that
there was a performed element at work in [the popular] milieu’. Our
discussion of ‘popular literature’ began with the religious festivals that
gave birth to Greek comedy. A link between the aischrologia and surviving
(largely iambic) poetry that includes scurrilous, obscene and often explicit
elements is just one way to link the oral and literature cultures, and the
blurred lines between these categories are demonstrated in Tom Hawkins’
chapter. Hawkins’ discussion of invective, which he sees as an important
example of performative speech, shows how both ‘elite’ and popular shared
the same demotic invective.182
A whole range of different types of texts, going beyond poetry, plays and
fiction, can of course be mined for what they can tell us about popular
culture, and the chapters in this volume provide many stimulating exam-
ples of this. Fables, as discussed by Toner, are one such case. The scholar’s
task is to identify, indeed excavate, popular elements in existing textual
traditions. However, we can also certainly look for popular literature
beyond texts. Graffiti, for instance, provides striking evidence again for
the interpenetration of high and low, including fascinating examples of
what have been seen as ‘sub-literary’ texts.183 Take, for instance, this
famous doubly punning take on the first line of the Aeneid, found on the
facade of the fullery of Fabius Ululitremulus in Pompeii: Fullones ululam-
que cano, non arma virumq(ue) (‘I sing of fullers and the owl, not arms and
the man’).184 Graffiti from Pompeii shows locals combining lines and
motifs from established poets (notably Virgil and Ovid) with their own
creations. Sometimes the literary and philosophical canons were mocked
in graffiti and artworks, such as the famous fresco from Pompeii depicting
Aeneas as a dog-headed ape.185 In this context too we can consider the
180
Wiseman 2009; see also Wiseman 1995, discussed further below. 181 Horsfall 2003.
182 183
See here too Ruffell 2003. See now Baird and Taylor 2011.
184
CIL 4.9131 (IX.Xiii.5). The owl is the symbol of fullers, while punning on the name of the fuller
Ululitremulus.
185
See Clarke (2007): 151–7.
Introduction 31
famous paintings from the Caupona of the Seven Sages in Ostia, which
appear to mock philosophical traditions, depicting the Sages defecating
with captions like ‘Thales advised those who shit hard to really work at
it.’186 Images such as this remind us of the complex interplay of visuality
and textuality, high and low in the ancient world.
As this suggests, any properly rounded account of popular culture
cannot ignore material culture. It should be stated at the outset that this
book does not offer a sustained archaeological engagement with the issue
of popular culture: that would require a wholly different book.
Nonetheless, artefacts including dolls, amulets and plates are included in
Chapters 10, 11 and 12. What we are dealing with here is not to be dealt
with most properly under the heading ‘art’,187 but rather ‘visual culture’ on
the one hand and ‘material production’ on the other.188 Classical artistic
production clearly encompassed a tremendous range, from what we might
call ‘elite’ and official art, such as marble statuary and paintings by famous
artists, down to the production of cheap artefacts in clay and wood.
An example of just one genre – the terracotta figurine – has many thou-
sands of examples from classical Greece alone. These include, for example,
depictions of dramatic and comic actors, people at work (the famous
groups from Boeotia) and deities; they were used as decorative objects,
toys and religious offerings in domestic, funerary and religious settings.189
Such objects clearly played an important role in defining people’s identities
and constructing their culture. In her chapter Pudsey considers the role
played by dolls and other toys in constructing children’s culture. Lewis
meanwhile considers the role of a variety of intriguing amulets (and related
objects) in ‘lived religion’; in particular she offers us an opportunity to put
these artefacts back into the now thoroughly sanitized context of the
Roman catacombs, and their authorized history. Chapter 11 shows again
how neglected objects can bring new angles to (textual) histories, showing
how a local corpus of ceramics might relate to the popularity of the Kalends
in late antique Gaul.
Considering the above material under the rubric of ‘art’ is not, therefore,
particularly helpful. There is nonetheless a lively scholarly tradition
186
See Clarke 2006, citing Bakhtin, plus Clarke 2003: 170–80.
187
‘Scholars point out that the Romans did not have a clear notion of art as an elevated creation,
cut off from the mundane practicality of other objects; they did not have the modern concept
of “art for art’s sake”; they did not even have a word for art, since the Latin ars, like the Greek
tekhnē, refers to all kinds of craft and skill. Roman “artists” are perhaps often best equated with
modern craftsmen, skilled workmen.’ Stewart 2008: 2. Though Stewart is here talking about
Roman art, pretty much the same can of course be said of Greek ‘art’.
188 189
See here Kampen 1995. See Higgins 1967.
32 LUCY GRIG
attempting to define Roman ‘popular’ art in particular, going back to

Rodenwaldt’s discussion of a Volkskunst,190 reformulated with a Marxist
flavour by Bianchi Bandinelli as arte plebea.191 Recently John R. Clarke
stridently concluded his monograph Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans:
This book should demonstrate how wrongheaded it is to try to understand non-
elite art as an expression of a particular group or class. In the end, there is no such
thing as folk, plebeian, or freedman art: there is only art at the service of ordinary
people who might use standard images for their house, shop, or tomb – or might
not.192
Not all will wish to accept such a depoliticized view of material culture
(moreover, the composition of Clarke’s ‘non-elite’, which takes in the own-
ers many of the most famous houses in Pompeii, is, in any case, proble-
matic). Nonetheless, issues of the relationship between centre and periphery,
official and non-official, Hellenized and indigenous, persist. Clearly
Roman visual culture, and indeed Roman artistic production, represent
a world of artistic pluralism, where indigenous traditions coexisted alongside
Hellenized ones, the former becoming more dominant in Late Antiquity.193
While traditional art-historical approaches persist, postcolonial influence
has reached the study of Roman archaeology, allowing for more pluralist
and decentralized views of Roman material production.194
The central questions relating to popular culture are posed sharply by
the case of visual culture, perhaps most obviously the question as to
whether what we can identify is a clear case of ‘trickle-down’ or not.
Both Paul Zanker195 and Andrew Wallace-Hadrill196 have powerfully
and influentially argued for the trickle-down of elite visual culture to
sub-elites (though not much further). Discussions of trickle-down have
often taken place in the context of studies of ‘Romanization’, and have been
open to critique as such.197 Even when used in the contexts of Pompeii and
Herculaneum analysis of ‘trickle-down’ tends towards condescension, such
190
See, in particular, Rodenwaldt 1940.
191
‘Plebeian’ chosen in preference to ‘popular’ (explicitly rejected), and contrasted with an ‘arte
aulica’ – court art, as well as an ‘arte patrizia’; clearly showing a debt to Gramsci, this plebeian
art was defined by Bianchi Bandinelli as ‘subalterno’: 1967, 1970: 51–105; see now Hölscher
2012.
192
Clarke 2003: 273. 193 See here Carrié 2002a: 34–5.
194
See, for instance, the essays collected in D’Ambra and Métraux 2006; Kampen 1995.
195
Across a range of publications, including Zanker 1975 on sarcophagi, Zanker 1988
on Augustan imagery and Zanker 1998 on Pompeian houses.
196
See, most recently, Wallace-Hadrill 2008: 313–55; see too 356–440. Mayer 2012: 23 notes how
this analysis is in line with Bourdieu’s 1984 concept of ‘social distinction’: the construction of
social status through ‘conspicuous consumption’, a concept which goes back to Veblen 1899.
197
See here Woolf 1998: 169–205, esp. 170–2, and Mattingly 2010: esp. 203–45.
Introduction 33
as when scholars criticize the ‘banalization’ of elite decorative schemes in

the houses of the sub-elite.198 The case of ‘freedman art’ represents perhaps
the clearest case of scholarly condescension, as strongly criticized by
Lauren Hackworth Petersen in her analysis of what she has called
‘Trimalchio vision’.199 Attempting to look at the ‘art’ of the non-elite in
their own terms allows us to see a visual culture that goes beyond notions of
trickle-down, as with the huge number of funerary monuments in which
Roman men and women proudly commemorated their working lives,
representing values very different from those of the elite.200
This begs a key question: can we in fact identify specifically popular
values, or indeed ideologies?201 Throughout this chapter questions of the
ideology of popular culture have consistently emerged, whether explicitly
and implicitly – for instance in the case of carnival, and the carnivalesque
and Scott’s ‘infrapolitics’ – and, in particular, the question of popular
resistance intervenes. We would probably do well to heed Peter Burke,
when he warns of the danger of anachronism, and of assuming ‘rather too
easily’ that subordinate social groups are indeed conscious of belonging to
a dominated class, over and above any other more specific local
identities.202 There is no doubt a danger of seeking to equate the ‘popular’
with the ‘radical’,203 leaving aside much clear evidence of popular con-
servatism. Ancient fables, for instance – classic cases of a ‘hidden tran-
script’ – are clearly ideologically diverse, including both conservative and
radical themes.204 Nonetheless, ‘reading against the grain’ clearly can
produce interesting new readings of ancient texts and ancient culture more
generally.205 The case of ancient slavery, where slave subjectivity would
seem impossible to access, nonetheless represents fertile ground here.
Some scholars would seek to ‘read against the grain’ here in order to seek
possible critiques of slavery, or indeed narratives even from the slave’s
198
See, for critique, Petersen 2006: 196 and Mayer 2012: 273, n. 5, on Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 173–4
(‘banalization’).
199
Petersen 2006.
200
See here, for instance, Kampen 1981, examining the ways in which Roman women at Ostia
celebrated their working careers.
201
On popular values and morality, see Dover 1974 on ancient Greece, and Morgan 2007 on the
Roman world.
202
Burke 2009: xviii.
203
For instance, on the lines of E. P. Thompson’s ‘moral economy’, Thompson 1971.
204
See here Morgan 2007: esp. 63–7; on social relations: 176–7.
205
As in the case of Peter Wiseman’s subtle attempts to highlight a popular, alternative version of
the history of early Rome, such as his interpretation of Romulus and Remus, which argues that
the story of Remus comes out of the ideological conflicts of the Early and Mid Republic:
Wiseman 1995. See also the essays collected in Wiseman 2009, which seek to establish
a ‘people’s narrative’ of the Late Republic.
34 LUCY GRIG
point of view, in places that are at first unlikely, including ancient fiction.
One such place is the Life of Aesop, the closest thing we have, for all its
problems, to a slave biography.206 The use of comparativist approaches to
ancient slavery, meanwhile, remains an important but problematic meth-
odology in current scholarship.207
The subject of ancient popular politics qua politics ‘proper’ is, by
comparison, rather more easily accessed, though it clearly requires treat-
ment on a diachronic, rather than a synchronic, level. Chapters in this
volume treat polities ranging from democratic Athens, through the Roman
Republic on to imperial Rome and therefore deal with very different
contexts. Democratic Athens obviously presents a unique case study for
studying a putative popular politics in the ancient world. A well-known
historical paradox lies in the fact that despite the persistence of democratic
rule in classical Athens, the majority of extant literary sources are hostile to
democracy. The surviving speeches of the Attic orators represent an
exception in that regard and have been mined for evidence of the nature
and extent of popular participation. Josiah Ober’s claim that the Athenian
demos ultimately held ‘ideological hegemony’,208 with upper-class politi-
cians acting as their spokesmen, has been much discussed and debated;209
David Cohen, for instance, has argued that the demos gave validation to
elite claims for honour and status.210 The most recent scholarship looks
rather to establish the influence of an arguably popular (that is, peasant)
culture, that of archaic Greece, in the politics and institutions of classical
Athens.211 Mirko Canevaro’s chapter here argues strongly for the dom-
inance of the popular in even the ‘official’ culture of democratic Athens.
The extent of popular participation in Roman republican politics,
meanwhile, remains controversial, particularly for the Late Republic.
The democratic element in the Roman constitution212 was theoretically
assured by the clear fact of the sovereignty of the populus Romanus.
Crucially, too, the Roman people elected magistrates in a secret ballot
206
On this theme see Hopkins 1993. Meanwhile another ancient novel, the Metamorphoses of
Apuleius, it has been argued, contains an extended metaphor for the experience of the slave in
the narrative of Lucius’ transformation into an ass: see Bradley 2000.
207
On the historiography of ancient slavery, see McKeown 2007.
208
Ober 1989: 332; cf. ‘the word demokratia was the name for a political society and culture in
which the most basic and elemental human power – the power to assign meanings to
symbols – belonged to the people’: 339.
209
See Canevaro’s chapter for full bibliography and discussion. 210 Cohen 1995: 193.
211
Schmitz 2004 represents a significant advance in scholarship, enlightening our view of archaic
peasant society, and its influence on the laws and culture of democratic Athens.
212
Famously described by Polybius: 6.11–18. Cf. Syme’s famously damning comment:
‘The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham’: Syme 1939: 15.
Introduction 35
from the end of the second century BCE.213 How far ordinary Romans
participated in politics has been much disputed, with estimates of voting
numbers ranging widely.214 The case of the plebs urbana, whose stake in
the politics of Rome is well known, is discussed in Cyril Courrier’s chapter.
The participation of the agrarian and Italian populations meanwhile, was
both sporadic and unpredictable.215 Even allowing for an optimistic assess-
ment of the participation of the plebs urbana, in the contiones and assem-
blies, the extent to which non-elites held any real political influence was
clearly limited. Even if recent scholarship has long abandoned notions of
a politics entirely dominated by clientage,216 the extent to which non-elites
possessed political influence should not be overstated. First of all we need
to consider the built-in advantage of the elite in the voting assemblies;
however, the ideological sway held by elite politicians in both the contiones
and the assemblies is just as important.217 Certainly key issues of ‘popular’
politics can be seen emerging consistently, particular those around issues
of land and food supply. However, even supposedly popularis politicians
remained part of an oligarchic system, radical reconceptions of which were
never truly possible.218 Nonetheless there were persistent concerns about
agitation among the urban plebs, as evidenced by the periodic legislation
against collegia as well as by the mob violence which marked the final years
of the Republic, as politicians such as Clodius mobilized discontents,
largely relating to food supply.219
The challenge, therefore, for the historian of popular culture is to view
the Roman non-elite beyond the confines of the ancient mob, and instead
to restore a degree of agency to this group, as both Courrier and Rosillo-
López show in this volume. Rather than understanding the urban plebs as
213
The secret ballot was a crucial anti-oligarchic measure and as such was disliked by conservative
politicians, e.g. Cicero, De legibus 3.15–16.
214
Contrast the pessimistic view of Mouritsen 2001: esp. 132–3, with the optimistic arguments for
participation of Millar 1995 and 1998. See Jehne 2006 for the most recent (low) estimates of
participation.
215
For instance, they came to Rome for Tiberius Gracchus, and to vote for the recall of Cicero
from exile in 57 BCE.
216
See North 1990a: 6–7 on the so-called ‘frozen waste theory’ of Roman politics.
217
As has been demonstrated by Morstein-Marx 2004: esp. 31–3 and 280–1: e.g. ‘[public oratory]
produced and perpetuated an ideological structure for the citizenry that reinforced the cultural
hegemony of the political élite’ (33); however, note the slight modification of position in
Morstein-Marx 2013.
218
Characteristically well put: ‘Genuine social concern or personal ambition led nobles like the
Gracchi, Caesar and Clodius to come forward as “popular” leaders from time to time, but there
was no consistent and continuous opposition, no organized and enduring popular party’:
Brunt 1966: 7.
219
See further Courrier’s chapter for bibliography and discussion.
36 LUCY GRIG
‘rent-a-mob’, Rosillo-López clearly demonstrates the unreliability of elite

sources for our understanding of late republican politics. Her chapter
reassigns political agency to the urban plebs by uncovering a neglected
aspect of popular political culture in the construction of political nick-
names. This concern with popular agency, shared by the chapters in this
book, is neatly described in this case by Nicholas Purcell:
The politics of the plebs urbana were in part its own. It was not a slate on which the
schemers of the Senate wrote whatever they wanted. The culture and social forms
of the many were not the product of skilled formation by the aristocrats: they were
agents too.220
Purcell has clearly shown that the benefits received by the urban plebs in
the form of subsidized (eventually free) grain and entertainment should
not be seen as handouts to a parasitic, indolent population, but rather as ‘a
bonus to denote their status’, with this elite/non-elite relationship continu-
ing and developing under the Principate.221 In this way we avoid accepting
the infamous satirical claims of Juvenal222 and other inherited, snobbish
notions of the ‘mob’, which go back to ancient elite authors,223 but have
been all too willingly accepted by classical scholars as part of the legacy of
the classical tradition.
One of the main aims of this volume is of course to escape a ‘bread and
circuses’ view of ancient popular culture.224 Instead, the book celebrates the
richness and diversity of ancient popular culture. This culture need not be
coterminous with a particular group of the population (such as the demos or
the Roman plebs). It need not necessarily originate (solely) from the ‘bottom
up’. It is a culture that can be shared by various sub-groups, and which can
have diverse possible relationships to elite and official culture(s). Ultimately,
we might prefer instead to talk of a network of ancient popular cultures. What
is crucial is that these ancient popular cultures were fully embedded in the
broader sphere of ancient culture and ideology. As this introductory chapter
has shown, we can find evidence of this network of cultures in diverse and
divergent places and ways across the ancient world. Ultimately, of course,
‘popular culture’ is a heuristic model, the point of which is to enable
a properly ‘thick’ description of (ancient) culture in all its richness.
The chapters that follow mark considerable progress towards this end.
220
Purcell 1994: 678. 221 Purcell 1996: esp. 805. 222 Juvenal, Sat. 10.75–81.
223
E.g. Tacitus, Hist. 1.4, contrasting the pars populi integra with the plebs sordida.
224
See still Yavetz 1969, written to contradict the idea of the selfish, fickle mob; also Garnsey 1988,
for a detailed discussion of the corn dole, demonstrating that the Roman plebs were neither
pampered nor lazy.

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1 Introduction: Approaching Popular Culture

in the Ancient World

Approaching Popular Culture

termed ‘high culture’. Popular culture itself is not specifically defined by

which was built an ideological ‘superstructure’.19 It should be noted that

imposing conformity through cultural means rather than through outright

reading, whereby popular culture is impossible because it is inevitably

tied to an essentially Marxist framework, the framework of class is best

Historicizing Popular Culture in the Premodern World

a revolutionary work of art.’ There is a long-running dispute as to how far we should

and by which it was sustained’ and as a ‘mental substratum’.74

Approaching Ancient Popular Culture

the first dedicated study of ancient popular culture in English78 actually

The various cleavages involved include such polarities as slave/free, citizen/

inequality that were very low indeed in comparison to other premodern

Accessing the rural, peasant cultures114 of ancient Greece and Rome

Having highlighted some of the aspects of popular culture to be dealt

Key Themes in Ancient Popular Culture

The subject of ‘popular religion’, unlike other areas of ‘popular culture’ in

Indeed, the very concept of ‘religion’ is increasingly seen as problematic

a history of the people, rather than ‘the hierarchical-institutional-bureaucratic corporation’:

the shrines’.132 Polybius however, in his discussion of the Roman constitu-

ultimate superstitio also developed, particularly in the fourth century CE

Frankfurter, like others, draws on the approach of Redfield, stressing the

religion as world-constructing is clearly crucial in any analysis of religion

frequently compared to carnival, and interpreted along Bakhtinian lines.157

170 171 172

performance and story-telling in the transmission of Roman historiogra-

attempting to define Roman ‘popular’ art in particular, going back to

as when scholars criticize the ‘banalization’ of elite decorative schemes in

‘rent-a-mob’, Rosillo-López clearly demonstrates the unreliability of elite

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