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.

Daniel Jolowicz is a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge. He is the author of Latin Poetry in the Ancient Greek Novels (2021). Jaś Elsner is a Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous works including Art and the Roman Viewer (Cambridge, 1995), Pilgrimage Past and Present (jointly with Simon Coleman) (1995), Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (2007), The Art of the Roman Empire A.D. 100-450 (2nd edition, 2018) and Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparison (2022).