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Was there a culture of the Roman plebs?

The last few years have seen a groundswell of interest in the lives of non-élite Romans. Recent work on the Roman economy has shown that not only leisured élites but also many working people lived in relative comfort and left their mark on Roman culture.1 Hundreds of thousands of working people lived relatively prosperous lives free from élite exploitation, without belonging to legally privileged orders such as the ordo decurionum. At this point, it has become uncontroversial to study successful artisans and traders as people “in the middle”, but it remains a matter of debate how to conceptualize them historically.2 Ancient literature, which was mostly written by educated political élites, was either disinterested in or dismissive of “the people”, and, typically, portrayed them as a largely homogenous mass. Yet it is clear that the Roman plebs was an economically and culturally multifaceted group. As Horace put it, every citizen in Rome was plebs whose net worth fell below the census requirement of that of the equestrian order. If someone as culturally sophisticated as Horace could be plebs for being 6000-7000 sesterces short of the 400,000 needed to qualify as knight, the plebs of Rome was a rather diverse group indeed.3 As the case of Horace shows, the problem with stratifying nonélites poses itself with particular urgency in the city of Rome. The capital was a microcosm of the Roman world, which not only included the imperial aristocracy of senators and knights but also hundreds of thousands of others from all over the known world who enjoyed vastly diverging levels of wealth and legal privilege. This makes Rome an excellent testing ground for analytical categories of non-élite society. Did the economic and social situation of the plebs give rise to specifically plebeian cultures and politics, and, if so, how can they be defined?