Pulling mainly from a July 2012 conference at the University of Edinburgh, editor (and contributor) Lucy Grig has here assembled an introduction and thirteen ssays that take a variety of approaches to ancient “popular culture.” The essays are divided into four sections, each based on a chronological, cultural and/or political framework: Classical Greece; the city of Rome; the larger Roman world; and Late Antiquity. Grig’s concise and impressive introduction sets out the goals and limits of the project—not claiming to provide full coverage of the topic, but working instead to bring the separate studies into a centered and engaged conversation. The book is mainly successful at doing this—and it is interesting that, despite its roots in the cultural analyses of notables such as Althusser, Bakhtin, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Gramsci, Scott, and (above all) Peter Burke, much of the direct work on the topic dates recently. Grig names the classicist Holt Parker as perhaps the most important thinker on “popular culture”—his 2011 definition is one of the volume’s main touchstones—but also cites the work of Nicholas Horsfall, Leslie Kurke, Sara Forsdyke, and Jerry Toner (also a contributor). One of Grig’s goals is to minimize negative interpretations of the evidence (which tend to frame the non-elite as unthinking, uncritical, or merely incapable of moving or producing culture) in favor of “thick description,” which understands the “popular” as networks embedded in larger cultural configurations. The essays that follow have been collegially written with these goals in mind, and Grig deserves praise for producing a volume that, despite its disparate subjects, reads as a considered whole.