The representation of an Amazon queen’s fantasized body turns attention to what is concealed by Amazon dress. These celanda function as a somatized preterition of Amazon customs that incites readerly speculation around their social meaning within an imagined society. Together with unanswered questions about the variantly gendered body and its meanings, the alterity of her physical presence invites the reader to entertain utopian alternative organizations of gendered identity grounded in a sexually variant perspective at the margin of the text’s fictional world. The preteritive attention paid to her experience and the world view of her society thus opens up the possibility of an "Amazon reading" of Alexander himself, and by extension an Amazon reading of the epic that celebrates his exploits. With the possibility of Amazon reading comes as well the possibility of solidarity among those who read like Amazons, a solidarity effected not by any commonality of essential identity, but by their willingness to read the text’s preteritions against the grain of a sanctioned, "straight" interpretation informed by the received cultural values of an "ideal" audience.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Questions of the American founding are organized around debates about its republican, liberal, or religious heritage. I locate the founding not in a historical moment but in a mythology reenacted in the cultural imagination. In that narrative, which America shares with Rome, the community is continually reconstituted by ongoing refoundings of Strangers who are dislocated from their own place and past. Where foundings are usually placed in service to securing an identity, the Roman and American foundings unsettle identity.The Introduction provides an argument for how we can understand the tensions that lie in the formation of identity and narratives of belonging, and how we can, in turn, draw on Rome to explore these tensions in American culture and politics.

Plutarch’s parallel structure of the Lives, pitting a Greek protagonist against a Roman hero, offers a fascinating array of interpretative possibilities where cultural and political resistance to Rome and Roman imperialism are two of its more interesting manifestations. This chapter suggests that Plutarch’s text, encoded with devices of figured speech (e.g. allegory, irony and innuendo), was meant to be read and understood by two distinct audiences simultaneously: a Greek readership and a Roman one. Thus, on one hand, to his Roman readers Plutarch can implicitly present the flaws of historical Greeks, which may come out through the overarching comparison, and which his typical Hellenocentric addressees might miss. On the other hand, the reading and circulation of Plutarch’s text would also constitute a sophisticated form of resistance to the contemporary imperial environment. The text therefore contains non-conformist elements which Roman readers completely overlooked. Two such subversive elements directed against Rome are discussed: (a) cultural resistance, with the employment of cross-cultural irony to propose the mismatch of Greek paideia in (barbaric) Rome; (b) political resistance through a subtle reading of the past, in particular the grafting of the Greco-Persian Wars onto the imperial reality and through a sophisticated comment on one instance of Greek active opposition to Rome.

The boundaries between space and place remain unsettled in the founding imagination in three ways: as a space that is unbounded since there is nowhere that cannot potentially be converted into a place; as a space that is already an inhabited place; and as a place that is continually infused with new groups, thus potentially altering the familiarity of that place. This chapter explores the fate of the Samnites in the Roman imagination and the Native Americans in the American imagination as the wild Stranger who threatens place. The Samnite and the Native American are different from the corrosive Stranger, yet both play a part in the construction of its identity. The Greeks, Italians, and Gauls remained a flourishing aspect of Roman culture even as they were cast as Strangers to make room for Rome’s ownership of its past, just as the European and immigrant were cast similarly in the United States. But the Samnites and Native Americans were frozen in time, simultaneously rendered invisible and retained as an image of not just the conquest of wildness but the unifying and securing of a familiar space.

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetic and cultural appeal of imperial Greek declamations that stage scenes of resistance, focussing on Polemo’s two declamations on the Battle of Marathon. I argue that in an era when ‘spectacular resistance’ (steadfast and ultimately in some sense triumphant resistance to oppression) was in vogue, as seen in the careers of figures such as Peregrinus the Cynic, Apollonius of Tyana, and early Christian martyrs, such declamations allowed elites to enjoy some of the glamour and rhetorical possibilities that spectacular resistance normally offered only to the powerless; there is a parallel here with the great play that Aelius Aristides and Polemo made of their struggles with illness. In particular, these declamations offered opportunities to indulge in the exuberant ‘Asian’ rhetorical style very fashionable at the time; moreover, artistic (rather than real) resistance allowed for the selection, full narration, and endless replay of the most attractive scenes. Finally, I suggest that the ‘controversial’ nature of the genre, in which counterarguments are always implied, and, in the case of Polemo’s duelling declamations, actually present, allowed Polemo simultaneously to present himself as in some degree superior to the trope of spectacular resistance.

The use of local languages is sometimes considered a marker of resistance to Roman power or culture. However, we show that continued use of local languages cannot necessarily be equated with resistance, nor is it easy to identify the use of language or script in particular inscriptions as driven by a desire to express resistance. This chapter discusses how (and whether) it is possible to know when resistance is involved in language use in the Roman Empire and examines case studies of inscriptional evidence pertaining to the use of Faliscan, Oscan, Paelignian, Venetic, Celtiberian, and Hebrew. We propose that many of them were written to present a ‘non-Roman’ rather than an ‘anti-Roman’ identity, and that ‘non-Roman’ identity could stand alongside both acceptance of Rome and violence resistance to its political hegemony.

Delphi did not play a crucial part in the creation and circulation of the predictive oracles. After recalling the importance that the modern narrative of ancient Greek history accords to the idea of Delphi, the relationship between oracular texts, events and historical narrative tradition is discussed, focusing on the question of whether the oracles are pertinent to the event or to the narration of the event. There are reasons to assume that the Delphic predictive responses were integral constituents of oracle stories embedded in narratives usually shaped by popular local knowledge. It can be argued that the origin of those oracle stories coincided with the development of the relevant ‘local’ traditions. What is more, oracular narratives contributed not only to reconfigure the past but also to construct an image of an event, or even the alleged event itself. The conclusion is that the oracle stories that hinge on predictive oracles are intrinsic elements of the cultural identity and image of the past belonging to specific political communities. They cannot have originated in Delphi, and they must be placed within the context of the Hellenic social memory; they are, indeed, an aspect of the pre-Herodotean oral tradition which has not yet been adequately recognised.

The papers in this volume offer a variety of perspectives on divinatory phenomena attested among ancient Greeks and do so across an appreciable span of time – from earliest Greek oracular notions evolved from pre-Greek sacrificial cult concepts to Greek narratives emanating from Roman imperial times. At the later end of the temporal continuum, Lucian is made especially conspicuous by Fields’ treatment of the satirist in her concluding chapter, but cumulatively Pausanias could hardly be judged to be inconspicuous in the volume, nor could Plutarch, the Delphic priest. But despite the thematic and chronological range of the contributions, there are commonalities and similarities that run throughout. Herodotus, for example, does not fail to make at least one appearance in every chapter and occupies a central position in the expositions of Chapters 3–7. In that core set of Herodotean chapters, however, the historian often provides a literary vehicle for rehearsal and consideration of matters of orality and of poetics relevant to divination pointing us back toward the earlier end of the temporal continuum on display within this work.

Roman rhetoric, deployed as a legal and political tool and as a means of generating social capital, presupposes that the words of the speaker or writer initiate a dynamic, socially efficacious process of reception, and that that process is the real point of speaking or writing at all. Words shape audience reactions; and yet they can’t tightly and precisely control them. The text taken on its own proffers meaning in potentia only. It’s actualized in the reactions of its readers. But readers are multiple, never the reader. Communities of readers are always ad hoc and at best imperfectly coherent, and the consequent instabilities of reception open a space for the articulation of heterodox sexual identities. It is these less stable but potentially more productive aspects of preterition—and with them an expanded understanding of the device that goes beyond the textbook definition—that this book will consider, as they inform a select group of medieval texts whose readerships extended from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and beyond. Contemporary queer theory offers a useful framework through which to analyze these potentially subversive receptions of canonical texts.