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95 results

Page 1 of 5

  • Introduction - Articulating Resistance
  • Edited by Daniel Jolowicz, Downing College, Cambridge, Jaś Elsner, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
  • Book: Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire
  • Published online: 23 December 2022
  • Print publication: 05 January 2023, pp 1-26
  • View extract

    Summary

    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.

Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire
  • Articulating Resistance under the Roman Empire
  • Edited by Daniel Jolowicz, Jaś Elsner
  • Published online: 23 December 2022
  • Print publication: 05 January 2023
  • View description
    This book explores the many strategies by which elite Greeks and Romans resisted the cultural and political hegemony of the Roman Empire in ways that avoided direct confrontation or simple warfare. By resistance is meant a range of responses including 'opposition', 'subversion', 'antagonism', 'dissent', and 'criticism' within a multiplicity of cultural forms from identity-assertion to polemic. Although largely focused on literary culture, its implications can be extended to the world of visual and material culture. Within the volume a distinguished group of scholars explores topics such as the affirmation of identity via language choice in epigraphy; the use of genre (dialogue, declamation, biography, the novel) to express resistant positions; identity negotiation in the scintillating and often satirical Greek essays of Lucian; and the place of religion in resisting hegemonic power.
  • 100 years of Dura Europos
  • Jaś Elsner
  • Journal: Journal of Roman Archaeology / Volume 34 / Issue 2 / December 2021
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2021, pp. 764-784
  • Print publication: December 2021
  • View extract

    It was more than 100 years ago, in March 1920, that British troops camping in the ruins of some unknown ancient fort on the Euphrates, named Al-Salihiyah in Arabic, during the skirmishing that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, dug a trench and excavated some astonishing wall paintings. The officers in charge, along with the Civil Commissioner, managed to call in an American archaeologist who happened to be in Syria at the end of April, James Henry Breasted, first director of the Oriental Institute in Chicago (founded the previous year, 1919). Breasted visited in May, in dangerous conditions and with the British about to withdraw. He stayed only a day, managing to clear and take photographs of the murals that depict the sacrifices of Conon and Julius Terentius in what later became known as the Temple of Bel or the Temple of the Palmyrene Gods.

  • 1 - Introduction
  • Edited by Jaś Elsner, University of Oxford
  • Book: Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity
  • Published online: 29 February 2020
  • Print publication: 19 March 2020, pp 1-24
  • View extract

    Summary

    Let us begin – outside the scope of this volume – with a concept, a metaphor, coined in the fields of social psychology and behavioural economics. The idea of ‘anchoring’ was introduced as a result of the study of how poorly the majority of people perform as intuitive statisticians: human beings tend to use any random number that has been offered to us when we need to make an estimate, and then stay too close to that as an anchor when making revisions.1 If one applies this model to the exercise of historical understanding in dealing with a range of empirical data and with uncertainty in its interpretation, it is clear that scholarship must consistently rely on anchors – more or less random, usually in the form of a current communis opinio, inevitably grounded in initial premises, assumptions, prejudices or values – to establish the starting points for interpretation. And it is equally clear that interpretations inevitably are tied to the anchoring assumptions from which they are generated – a case of hugging close to the anchor. Obviously there are many respects in which such interpretive anchors are common-sense defences against potential rocks or shoals along the coast of scholarly travel (such as excess in speculation). But – especially when anchors are founded in starting points that may at a given time be collectively acceptable but are nonetheless fundamentally erroneous, wrongheaded, or immoral (such as that sound interpretations are possible only from scholars of certain races, a normative premise in Germany between 1933 and 1945) – then anchoring equally obviously prevents clear thought and restrains the scholarly boat from sailing the wide seas in search of truth, or in pursuit at least of new questions and answers.2

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