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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Second Corinthians 10–13 contains considerable verbal irony spread over a relatively short stretch of text, where there is interplay between sarcasm (2 Cor 11:4–5, 19–21; 12:11, 13) and self-deprecating irony (asteismos, 10:1; 11:8, 21; 12:13, 16) that does not occur in other letters. Analysis of these two forms of irony is used to nuance previous scholarship on these chapters, including scholarship on irony in Paul’s so-called ‘fool’s speech’ and instances where historical claims have been made on the basis of ironic passages.

This chapter weighs the evidence for sarcasm in Paul’s expression of astonishment (thaumazō hoti) in the opening of Galatians (1:6), which some scholars have considered an epistolary convention for expressing ‘ironic rebuke’. I then discuss whether the epithets that Paul uses to refer to the ‘pillar’ apostles in Gal 2:2, 6, and 9 can be classified as sarcastic and how their use serves Paul’s rhetorical aims across the autobiographical section of Galatians, before pushing back on a common misidentification of sarcasm in Gal 5:12.

Case studies on Job and the prophets in their Septuagint translations are used to address the question ‘What does sarcasm do?’ – the issue of sarcasm’s pragmatic functions. I hypothesize that sarcasm normally functions as an implicit challenge to what the speaker perceives as a claim to some positive quality made by another party. It is appropriate so long as it is not used against the grain of social hierarchy, although the prophets show a willingness to engage in more subversive uses of sarcasm.