Philogelos stock-character jokes
About the work
Imported from the workbook's Full reassessment sheet, revised 7 October 2026 (record ID 32). The assessment below is the workbook's comparative judgment under its stated criteria; source links and limits are retained.
Workbook assessment: Spread only
Date or witness: Late-antique compilation, usually estimated 4th–5th centuries CE; incorporates older material and survives in later manuscripts
Region: Greek-speaking Roman world
Workbook date-sort bounds: 300 CE to 500 CE; these bounds are not automatically invention or disappearance dates.
Description
Roughly 265 short jokes organize themselves around recurring targets such as the foolish intellectual, miser, boastful person and allegedly stupid inhabitants of particular towns. Many use reusable joke structures.
Evidence of adoption or transmission
A collection preserves reusable joke structures, repeated stock targets and variants.
What remains uncertain
Literary collection and manuscript copying do not, without further evidence, identify bottom-up or working-class circulation.
Workbook revision note: Reassessed using grassroots criteria