The Acta Alexandrinorum Political Fiction from the Chora

The Acta Alexandrinorum, also known as the Acts of the Pagan Martyrs, are a group of fragmentary stories about Alexandrian embassies visiting the Roman emperor, which are generally interpreted as giving an Alexandrian perspective on relations with Rome. Research has not yet sufficiently considered textual elements that contradict the supposedly pro-Alexandrian message of the most intact of these papyri. This article proposes to situate authorship and readership of the Acta Isidori, Antonini et Pauli, and Appiani, constituting the heart of what is now often thought to be a coherent genre or corpus, in the provincial elite circles of Egypt, that is, among the metropolitan and gymnasial orders. Rather than treating the embassy stories as a separate genre or corpus, we should see them as individual compositions within a larger tradition of political fiction, in which the reuse of narrative form for different messages was common practice. In doing so, we do justice to the political participation of the Greek-speaking inhabitants of the chora, who, as it turns out, had ample reason to take a critical stance towards Alexandria and Rome.