Slaves Tell Tales: And Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece

"In this original and arresting study, Sara Forsdyke explores Greek literature's complex hybrid of elite literary culture and the non-elite, largely oral culture that lies below its surface. She ambitiously examines themes, imagery, and symbolism with a view to detecting subtle traces of sub-elite popular culture as it existed in both free and unfree social contexts. She is as interested, for example, in how slaves tell tales as she is in the tales the masters told themselves about their slaves; there has never before been a book angled quite like this one."--Paul Cartledge, University of Cambridge

"In this original and stimulating work, Sara Forsdyke carefully sets forth a methodology for assessing ancient Greece's non-elite culture and applies it in a number of engaging case studies, challenging previous scholarship, but without polemic. This book should be of interest to a broad audience of classicists and historians of later periods."--Matthew R. Christ, Indiana University