This chapter explores the spectacles of gladiators, bare-knuckle boxing, and the early theater. Wild, violent bodies were banned in Rome and America: the gladiator excluded from civic participation and protections; boxing matches banned through much of the nineteenth century. Both bodies were marked by wounds, but even more by a brashness and ruggedness that was contrary to standards of elite decorum. These bodies were the object of elite condemnation as uncivilized, uneducated, and unrefined. And these bodies were the object of the gaze, put on display to perform to the expectations of the audience. The problem is that boundaries of exclusion prove to be permeable. And these boundaries prove to be permeable because the lawless, uncivilized bodies replay the role of violence in constituting a founding identity. The conquest of wild, lawless nature in the name of civilization required a type of body, one that could act with similar violent wildness. To the chagrin of certain elites, the taboo body comes to be valorized, grafted and grafting itself onto the rugged origins embedded in the founding ideal.

Lucian’s Imagines, the literary portrait of Panthea, mistress of the emperor Lucius Verus, offers rich material for resistant readings of the relation between Greek-educated subject and Roman ruler in the second century. Yet the fact that any potential critique of power in it is expressed through means provided by and consonant with Roman power makes any resistance in it difficult to pin down. This chapter compares the Imagines with another second-century literary portrait of power, the self-portrait of Marcus Aurelius, Verus’ co-emperor, in Book One of the Meditations. These portraits of fragmented identities are executed with the same combinatory technique: Panthea’s body and soul are the sum of the best picks from Greek paideia, and the emperor’s self is the sum of the exempla provided by the people in his life. But this commonality highlights, by contrast, the irreconcilability of the respective models and purposes, which makes the Imagines’ neglect of its contemporary world stand out more sharply as a sign of resistance.

The chapter explores efforts to answer how a community premised on a dislocation from the past, but comprised of people who bring with them their own pasts, locates itself in time. How does a community constituted by other pasts not simply blur into those pasts? I argue that in both Rome and the United States a particular type of Stranger, the corrosive Stranger, is constructed in response to this question. The corrosive Stranger is not defined against some preexistent purity, but is used to construct an imagined purity that gives a community a genealogy that distinguishes it from other communities and also posits a notion of true belonging that is different from juridical membership. I look at the different efforts by Cato the Elder, Cicero, and Varro for the Romans and then by Noah Webster for the United States to craft a genealogy of national identity that is defined against the threats of the corrosive Stranger. I then look at attempts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington to confront the burden of memory reflected in the Stranger marked by race who carries America’s own memory.

This chapter focuses on the romance of Apollonius of Tyre, a late antique text that is perhaps the successor of a lost Hellenistic original. At the very outset of that work—whose Nachleben extends from a fragmentary eleventh-century Old English translation, through Gower’s Confessio Amantis, to the Shakespearean Pericles, Prince of Tyre—circumlocution of the incestuous rape that sets the plot in motion structures the entire narrative around a double bind of desire that cannot be named but is signified in the silences that continually call the reader’s attention to it. Preterition is both repeatedly performed by the characters themselves and governs the entire work as a kind of master narratological trope, akin to the unconscious logic of dreams as understood by Freud and Lacan.

In a ringing monologue of the Prometheus Bound attributed to Aeschylus, the shattered hero inventories his gifts to humankind: architecture, astronomy, mathematics, writing, domestication of animals, seafaring, medicine, metallurgy, divination. The modern lay reader will be startled that a list of clearly technical practices (tékhnai [τέχναι]) should not only include divination (mantikḗ [μαντική]) but in a sense climax with it, giving it pride of place by devoting nearly as much space to its elaboration as to all the others combined. A different ontological mindset, but not entirely so. An elemental characteristic of civilized humanity is the abiding need for assurance in a world of uncertainty and chanciness that ever defies our drive to tame it to our will. We rely – some more, some less – on our weather forecasts, our investment advisors, our odds-makers, our guidance counselors, our DNA tests, and in lighthearted moments, our horoscopes and fortune cookies. Moreover, cognitive science assures us that humanity harbors an innate tendency toward “hyperactive agency detection” (see , below), a hardwired predisposition to identify a hidden agent, often an intelligent personal agent, where none is apparent. From our modern perspective this tendency seems more pronounced in ancient societies. That is an assessment that may require reexamination.

The question of whether a supreme authority can perform resistance – a notion presupposing confrontation with a force that is equal, if not superior – is here addressed through the case study of Emperor Julian’s opposition to Christianity. During the year and a half of his rule, Julian engaged in attempts to control the religious life of the Roman Empire, seeking to reverse the religious agenda pursued by his Christian predecessors Constantine and Constantius II. His writings, however, do not voice a top-down approach to religious confrontation, but rather deploy forms of expression that are traditionally associated with subaltern dissidents, such as humour and figured speech. Julian’s literary choices point to his self-perception – and self-narrative – as grappling with forces that were greater than his contingent position of authority. In particular, the positioning of his response to Christianity in the field of philosophy (Against the Galileans) betrays his alertness to contemporary narratives of Christianity as the system of knowledge that had displaced the philosophical schools of Greece and Rome. To this claim, Julian reacted with a defence of Greek philosophy and religion against what he perceived as Christianity’s aggressive and power-endorsed intrusion in the spheres of theology, philosophy, and interpretation of history.

Thus speaks Prometheus, as he was most likely staged by Aeschylus in mid-fifth century BC Athens. Portrayed in chains in the outer reaches of the inhabited world, in the far and desert North, the hero addresses the chorus of Oceanids, singing from the orchestra to the public gathered in the theater dedicated to Dionysos Eleuthereus at the foot of the Acropolis. In this famous monologue, Prometheus enumerates and boasts about the different technical arts he has invented for the mortals. Among these tékhnai (τέχναι) he mentions various divinatory practices (mantikḗ [μαντική], line 484): namely (1) the interpretation of dreams, of omens, or of connections and coincidences (sumbóloi [συμβόλοι], line 487) as may happen along the way; (2) the observation of different species of rapacious birds in flight; (3) the examination of the shape and glint of a sacrificed animal’s viscera and liver; and finally (4) the reading of smoke and flames emanating from the sacrificial portion offered to the gods. All these divinatory practices belong to a long list of gifts bestowed by Prometheus: from the invention of numbers and of the alphabet (μνήμην ἁπάντων, μουσομήτορ’ ἐργάνην ‘the tool that enables all things to be remembered and is mother of the Muses’, line 461),3 to the beneficial remedies of medicine, mentioning also the yoke and harness that enable the use of animals, especially for plowing, the reading of the rising and setting of the stars for the sake of agricultural labor, the sailing for navigation, and the working of metals ‘hidden beneath the earth’ (lines 500–501), namely copper, iron, silver, and gold.

The Sibylline Oracles, Greek hexameters blending history, eschatological prophecy, and moral advice for various nations, are ascribed to the pagan prophetess Sibyl but were in fact composed and updated by Jews and then Christians from the second century BCE onwards. Many oracles feature an explicitly anti-Roman tone. Considering modern labels for the collection, from ‘missionary’ to ‘apocalyptic’ literature, this chapter evaluates a range of reasons to consider the growth of the corpus as an example of resistance to Roman rule, bearing in mind how (subtly) ‘resistance literature’ is usually said to operate. First, both the ascription of the oracles to the Sibyl, so appropriating what had become a Roman tool of power and knowledge, and the use of archaic Greek hexameters may be considered forms of ‘compositional resistance’ whereby authoritative genres are inverted. The Sibyllists’ wish to control forms of language and knowledge dominant in their society may also be deduced through close analysis of their language and styles. Our examination then moves to the level of content or theme (‘contextual resistance’), subdivided into the characteristically Sibylline topics of schematised history, eschatological anticipation about Nero, and forms of recommended behaviour. It is shown that biblical and Roman models are invoked and turned against Rome.

Lucian’s satires on Peregrinus of Parium and Alexander of Abonoteichos illustrate the growing importance of religion in contests over cultural authority in the second century CE. Prophecy in particular plays a central role in the establishment of Peregrinus’s and Alexander’s authority, and in the satirist’s reframing of these men as charlatans. In fabricating his own prophecies, and thus competing with these would-be holy men at their own game (however satirically), Lucian threatens to reveal himself as just another fame-seeker within the agonistic display culture of the high Roman empire.

In this epilogue, we consider first the language of resistance and how its rhetoric encodes a complex and competing set of positionalities: it is hard, we argue, to distinguish between cultural resistance and cultural difference. This process is especially complex in the Roman Empire, where cultural conflict between Roman and Greek, for example, has to negotiate the surprising dynamics of cultural authority where the colonisers privilege the culture of the conquered, and where Christianity is a major vector in the changing nature of resistance over time. This opening discussion leads to six ways in which the case of the Roman Empire offers a particularly productive and challenging model for contemporary resistance studies, which shows a way forward from this volume: first, resistance from marginalised groups and the possibility of institutional rejection of dominant culture; second, resistance from within the elite; third, resistance as a multidirectional process which is testimony to the fragility of imperial self-assertion; fourth, the resistance between classes, and especially slaves to masters; fifth, how the imaginary of resistance – its narratives and tropes – functions; sixth, how resistance has its own historical account which shifts from public acts of resistance to models of inwardness.

What happened when oracular consultations “failed”? Modern scholarship tends to emphasize how ancient Greek oracular consultation provided clarity and a sense of control for its clients. In contrast, myriad tales about oracles from across ancient literature tell of hopes raised and dashed, mortals who misunderstand, and oracles that mislead. This essay suggests that we might productively explore these stories as responses to an important aspect of ancient lived experience: specifically, when the events that an oracle had foretold did not occur. Focusing on oracles concerned with the foundations of settlements, this essay begins by examining how scholars have previously explained such apparent oracular failures by appealing to a combination of “structural blocks to falsifiability” (e.g., mortal misunderstanding) and ancient piety. Drawing on psychological theories and anthropological studies of failed prophecy, this essay offers an alternative account of the ways in which failed oracular pronouncements were explored, explained, and managed by those who received them. Stories of oracular failure reveal how creatively cultural resources – from storytelling to cult foundation – were employed to preserve the core concepts of communities and their cultures.

Against an earlier tendency to separate out the texts of oracles from the literary works that preserve them, recent scholarship on Herodotus has increasingly focused attention on the very tight way in which oracular responses are integrated into the narrative contexts that surround them. In order better to conceptualize such phenomena, scholars are increasingly employing the category of “oracular tales,” that is, stories in which (normally Delphic) oracles form an integral part of the narrative texture. The present contribution seeks to pursue this line of enquiry further in an attempt at determining what the use of oracular responses in metric form can tell us about the tradition of oral narrative that Herodotus’ Histories are based upon.