This chapter explores the crises of the Roman and American republics. Understanding these crises requires that we view politics as an arena of identity contestation rather than simply interest articulation. What changes in both Rome and the United States is that participants came to see each other as Strangers, no longer sharing the same background assumptions, the same sense of the past, nor the same anticipation of the future. Borne of distrust, norms of getting things down turned into norms of obstruction. This had implications for how politics was experienced. The changes in these norms not only disabled these institutions, making them unable to actualize a future, but also made possible alterations in the political framework that might have been inconceivable before. In particular, one sees the elevation of individuals who offered solutions by promising to bypass those ineffective and unresponsive institutions. That is, as institutions and processes become distant abstractions that no longer answer to fundamental questions of the future of the community, the individual becomes the tangible personification of politics, answering these questions in a singular voice.

Because dialogue represents philosophy happening in the context of interpersonal relationships, it is a natural place to investigate power dynamics, both displays of power and displays of resistance. But in literature, unlike in life, the power dynamics are completely within the control of one person, the author, who can script the situation as he chooses. In this chapter, I argue that there was a change in the rules of comportment found in literary dialogues between the first and fourth centuries CE that can be traced through paying close attention first to the appearance and then to the development of a new character in these discussions – a judge. A shared embrace of forensic rhetoric to express philosophical antagonism existed across changing modes of judgement in the Roman Empire. I argue that this forensic dialogic mode was introduced as a mode of sublimation of political energy, as a rerouting of resistance into a safer domain of scholastic antagonism.

A thirteenth-century gloss on Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis dutifully approves the author’s omission of incriminatory detail as in line with the poem’s declared panegyric aims, even as it expounds a phrase in the text that alludes obliquely to Alexander’s scandalous behavior. What the glossator fails to register is that if Walter really wants to praise Alexander, he’s here been singularly incompetent at it. But a reader who has a rather more positive view of the possibility of world conquerors mixing it up with Persian toy-boys has ample space here to imagine it happening. Such a reader can plausibly seize precisely on the poem’s general celebration of Alexander in their reading of the supposedly derogatory allusion. Perhaps, to the mind of such a reader, Walter is suggesting that what Alexander gets up to in the privacy of the royal tent is nobody else’s business.

In this introduction, we establish a framework for resistance studies as it relates to the ancient Mediterranean world, and especially to Rome as an imperial power. The first section explores the changing scope of resistance studies over the past century and how the three principal twentieth-century discussions of resistance by Classicists have been framed by Nazi Germany, the French colonial experience in Africa seen from the viewpoint of early postcolonialism, and the activities of McCarthyite America in the Cold War. It also sets out the range of theoretical and methodological approaches to resistance that recur throughout the volume. The second sections consists of discussion and summaries of the contributions. The third section offers Augustine as a case study of reading resistance at the level of an individual’s identity formation. The fourth section discusses the question of imperial Greek existence under Rome and ends with a case study of Pausanias.

This chapter argues that Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe is exceptional among the extant novels for its ideological entanglement with Rome, a status in no small part a result of the author’s opening proclamation to be from the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, a ciuitas libera and perennially loyal pet of the Roman emperors. The first section of this chapter suggests that the novel’s fictional status affords it a degree of licence to ‘speak truth to power’, evidence of which can often be found in details that do not quite make sense (‘glitches in the matrix’). The second section mobilises a range of theoretical models from resistance studies to argue that one such detail, the presence of ‘Phrygian pirates’, represents a sideswipe at Roman military and imperial pretensions. The third section presses the interpretative potential of Chariton’s claim to be from Aphrodisias and argues that, although a strongly local text, it is irredeemably enmeshed in the politics of the Mediterranean world. The fourth section explores how the public use of Phrygian iconography in Aphrodisias as a strategy of ‘kinship diplomacy’ with Rome contrasts with the negative connotations of ‘Phrygian’ in Chariton’s novel, which indicates that even a city as openly pro-Roman as Aphrodisias was capable of expressing dissent.

This essay investigates pre-battle omens and portents through three interpretative lenses: the ontological turn in anthropology, literary and historiographical criticism, and the cognitive science of religion. The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC is used as a case study because Xenophon, Ephorus of Cyme, and Callisthenes of Olynthus recorded a uniquely large number of portents. Given that Leuctra fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Greek world, the various omens and portents described by our sources are fully consistent with the normative Greek worldview that signs were sent by the gods before important events. Scholars have been much more open to accepting that, despite some literary embellishment, the Greeks recognized omens retrospectively, but prospective omens are not improbable in a culture that was continually on the lookout for god-sent signs. The likelihood of prospective omens is confirmed by a comparative study of the omens that appeared to members of the Seventh Cavalry and to their Arikara scouts before the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. We must avoid projecting a post-Enlightenment understanding of reality onto other cultures, thus devaluing the human dependence on communication with supernatural powers that was so central to the experience of the ancient Greeks.

Macedonian kings used four methods of divination common among the Greeks – extispicy and other sacrifices, teratology, oneiromancy, and oracles – and resembled the Greeks in regard to when and how they consulted seers. The evidence mainly concerns Alexander III but allows conclusions to be drawn about traditional Macedonian royal practice. This practice differed from Greek divination on two counts: the employment of Egyptian and Babylonian seers by both Alexander and his Successors and the combination of royal divination with ruler cult; in other words, the combination of some sacrifices made by or for Macedonian kings with sacrifices made to them as quasi-divine beings. Demetrius Poliorcetes illustrates the perils of combining divination and ruler cult. This chapter also surveys Macedonian divinatory personnel, notably Aristander of Telmessus, Alexander’s chief seer, but also including unnamed Babylonian seers employing astrological methods foreign to the Greeks and Macedonians.

In the devotional works of Aelred of Rievaulx, a rhetorical trope that properly characterizes the oblique indictment of vice functions instead to draw the reader toward awareness of unfulfilled and quite literally unspeakable possibilities of men dwelling together in a blessedness of charity that welcomes embodied desire as a resource of the spirit. Aelred’s gestures toward the unspoken, throughout the corpus of his devotional writings, open up a space where ointment, mingled with unabashedly shed tears, drips over the feet of the enfleshed Christ, where the devotee licks the dust from his feet, where the companions of the twelve-year old Jesus swoon over his beauty, and where men united in the common life of a monastic community long in their imaginations for physical embrace, in imitation of the Beloved Disciple.