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 explores the ways in which the relationship between contemporary exegesis and the history of interpretation has been changing, to admit greater influence from premodern practice than was often allowed during modern times. Premodern interpretation is considered with examples from Augustine and Hugh of St, Victor, and then contemporary examples of reading the parable of the Good Samaritan and Psalm 137 are discussed to sample the issues.

The introduciton opens my exploration of Cicero’s notion of will. I argue that the will is an original Latin contribution to the Western mind. Cicero’s letters, speeches, and treatises show how his skill for language gave him a subtler take on events and a richer repertoire of persuasion. Practical uses of will are foremost: mapping alliances, winning elections, and navigating the “economy of goodwill.” From his earliest writings, however, voluntas emerges in normative claims about law and politics: that Rome’s mass of precedents could be rationalized through Greek ideas. Chief among these is Plato’s precept that reason must rule, and thus an alliance of philosophy and tradition can save the dying Republic. Transmuting political failure into philosophical innovation, Cicero lays the foundation for an idea – the will and its freedom – with tremendous consequences for Western thought. For Cicero, voluntas populi becomes the binding force of a nominally popular but functionally aristocratic constitution. If this state of affairs looks familiar in today’s “democratic” republics, we have Cicero in part to thank. Insistence on the singularity of popular will and mistrust of the common citizen lie at the heart of today’s political crisis and will require Ciceronian creativity to fix.

At the beginning of the debate over free will, freedom is nowhere to be found. In the Hellenistic period, the question of human autonomy is not one of freedom (eleutheria) but instead, given the nature of the universe, what is “up to us” (eph’emin) and thus left to our choice (prohairesis). It is Cicero and the Epicurean poet Lucretius who first turn the debate into one specifically over man’s freedom from fate. But Cicero’s idea of the will’s libertas – its opportunity to conquer vice and win honor – is very different from that of Lucretius in De rerum natura, a text Cicero read and may even have edited. De fato, one of the last in his corpus, returns to the question of a libera voluntas explicitly to refute the Epicurean doctrine of the swerve (clinamen) and their abandonment of civic duty. For Cicero, free will is the locus of public virtue, the justification of “praise and honors,” and the power to strengthen ourselves against natural vice. Cicero’s letters reveal, in turn, that this technical treatise on fate has decidedly political stakes for the Roman Republic.

Chapter 1 turns to Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise De musica to elucidate the theoretical ideas about music and poetry that lie behind Herbert’s musical practices. Herbert is known to have greatly valued Augustine’s works, yet few critics have engaged the implications of Augustine’s musico-poetic treatise on Herbert’s work. For both Augustine and Herbert, music and poetry were arts of ‘moving and measuring well’. Expressive musical and poetic performance was both an aesthetic and an ethical act, with implications for the health of body and soul. For both writers, this metaphysical understanding of the nature of music was derived from practical experiences of music-making. Reading The Temple in light of De musica reframes our understanding of Herbert’s poetry of affliction as a tuning of the individual and provides the reader with an overview of the theological ramifications of music that this book explores.

This chapter explores connections among one ‘virtue of acknowledged dependence’, humility, as elaborated by Augustine; the right or just according to nature; and human rights. The opening section argues that in defending virtuous humility, Augustine defends a new account of natural right, supporting this thesis with a reading of The City of God, books I-V. After this analysis, our focus shifts a central framer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Lebanese philosopher-diplomat Charles Habib Malik. Drawing on the archive of Malik’s papers and on his publications and lectures, we offer a select history of Malik’s study of Augustine’s work and his distinctively Augustinian perspective on themes such as humility, natural right and natural law, and human rights. We turn next to the text of the Universal Declaration, considering its Augustinian affinities as well as key divergences from Augustine’s views. The final sections of the chapter argue that Augustinian notions of humility and pride are central to Malik’s appraisal of the Declaration and the contemporary human rights project more generally, in their substance as well as their modes of expression.

This chapter explores what historical significance Manicheism has for the work of Frantz Fanon. It explores the role that St. Augustine’s anti-Manicheism might play in Fanon’s thinking, and the ways in which members of the Front de Libération Nationale in the Algerian war were deeply conscious of the historical terrain of Manicheism. This chapter argues that the quasi-Hegelian absolute negative is Fanon’s most powerful rebuke to both conventional Hegelian dialectic itself, and to the colonial manicheism that Fanon urges the colonized to overcome.

The tendency in our political moment for fascists to appropriate medieval symbols and stories for their own ends was preceded by the same phenomenon in the middle of the twentieth century. Then, as now, thinkers of various kinds challenged the Nazi mischaracterization of the Middle Ages, with some thinkers going even further, finding in the medieval world potential solutions to problems that plague modernity. Hannah Arendt was one of those thinkers. Her engagement with the Middle Ages was profound, stemming from her dissertation on St Augustine, to her sustained discussion of both Augustine and John Duns Scotus in her final work, The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s appropriation of these thinkers was political in the early part of her career, in which Augustine provided her with a framework for a political community based on the shared experience of loving one’s neighbor, a vision she articulated in her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, but that also appeared at key moments as a potential solution to the problems discussed in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Later in her career, Arendt’s writings on medieval thinkers turned more phenomenological, as she explored those aspects of the human condition that underpinned her earlier political work. For Arendt, Augustine, and especially Duns Scotus, provided a robust understanding of free will, which is necessary for political activity and the creation of new forms of living together. Ultimately, Arendt beliefs, especially about race, make it impossible to uncritically adopt her positions in our own moment. And yet, her thoughts about the Middle Ages can still provide us important ways to think about our present crises.

Augustine is rightly regarded as one of the major figures of Christianity. Through him Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophy was appropriated in the new religious context and there is hardly another thinker of the early Christian tradition who can better illustrate Nietzsche’s remark on Christianity as a Platonism for the people than Augustine. Things are, however, more complicated than Nietzsche suggests. As Étienne Gilson has showed, there is a strong tension between medieval Aristotelianism and the necessity to respect the early foundational authority, which Saint Augustine incontestably was. Aquinas has in this sense a quite complicated relation to his predecessor. In order to understand what is at stake in Augustine’s understanding of the biblical message of love, heavily influenced by Paul, it is important not only to describe the Neoplatonist roots of Augustine’s thought, but also to take the wider ancient context into account – and in this way arrive at a more complete picture of the historical and intellectual setting. The modification Augustine brings to the Aristotelian conception of the soul is hereby particularly revealing. A closer study of the relation between desire and love can shed some light on this highly significant constellation.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Three focuses on kin-slaying, first tracing the influence of the biblical legend of Cain and the classical legend of Romulus and Remus on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for kin-slaying in early medieval legal and historical texts. As insular origin narratives expanded, their authors recognised the narrative need to explain ancestral exile. The idea that a foundational ancestor had committed the crime of kin-slaying was introduced via the Brutus story in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum and proved subsequently popular, as exile was theoretically the legal sentence for this crime. As a narrative motif, kin-slaying allowed a people to retain the prestige of ties to ancient dynasties while embracing political independence in the present moment.