2025 Theses Doctoral

Celebrity and Urban Politics in the Imperial Greek 𝘗𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘴

Harmsworth, Geoffrey

This dissertation studies the phenomenon of celebrity and celebrity culture in the civic life of Greek cities in the Roman empire (c. 1st century CE – 3rd century CE). Drawing on literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence and a variety of methodologies, I outline the cultural and political contexts for celebrity as a political phenomenon – in festival culture, performance culture, honorific practice – and as an element of the social imaginary expressed in literary discourse, inscriptions, and the urban mediascape.

Drawing on Sharon Marcus’ (2019) model of celebrity culture as a dynamic contest over agency between celebrities, audiences, and media, I show how celebrity politics not only gave the Imperial Greek 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘴 its distinctive appearance, but how that same elitist façade masks the political agency exercised by urban crowds.

The aim is thus to provide a more expansive vision of urban politics, which accounts for crowd agency in both institutional and extra-institutional forms, while not ignoring elite attempts to exercise power in the public sphere. I argue that traditional views of elite power and oligarchic shifts in the political structure of the Imperial 𝘱𝘰𝘭𝘪𝘴 overestimate the cohesiveness of urban elites as a class, while a model of celebrity culture reveals how the pursuit of distinction among the wealthiest and most visible minority of elites both undermined elite solidarity and granted power to the urban crowds who controlled the currency of celebrity.