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.

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.