Sophistic Floralities: Flowers in Imperial Prose investigates floral language asmetaliterary discourse from its origins in Sappho and the Greek anthologists of the Hellenistic period to the prose literature, oratory, and philosophy of the “Second Sophistic” and its ensuing genres, such as the ancient Greek novels. My dissertation argues that flowers rarely serve as aesthetic ornamentation alone, and instead create intermedial spaces for analyzing the relationships between textuality and humanity within the nature-culture divide. The project introduces and defines the term “florality” as a conceptual network connecting the real- world ecologies of flowers to the socially constructed systems of literary culture. Though the term “florality” has no direct equivalent in the ancient world, the dissertation shows that it has comparative value in defining intertextually related discourses that reveal trends in ancient conceptions of the human and non-human worlds. The dissertation methodologically differentiates each author’s individual florality based on their respective concerns for anthropocentrism, literary excess (that is, being “florid”), and plant agency. In applying the lens of material eco-criticism to “Second Sophistic” literature, the dissertation offers a new perspective on a literary culture so enmeshed in archaism and sophisticated engagements with the literary tradition that floral discourse, in its complexity, ephemerality, and beauty, becomes a primary mode for metaliterary self-definition. The first chapter of the dissertation organically defines “florality” and “anthomorphism” in a series of case studies tracking the development of the floral metaphor in poetry, especially in Sappho and the anthologies of Meleager and Philip. The second chapter demonstrates how florality in the ancient novels can shape and define the aesthetic experience of the reader and build realistic worlds in the novels of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, and Heliodorus. The third chapter demonstrates the discursive and cosmological agency of flowers in the novels of Longus and Achilles Tatius as they develop erotic philosophies and world orders in manners parallel to modern eco-critical theories. The fourth chapter analyzes the metaliterary valence of flowers in constructing “educated” modalities of interaction with the literary tradition and culture in Philostratus, Lucian, and Plutarch.