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.

Covers the last century of the school’s activity, including lesser-known figures such as Euphrates, Hierocles, Cleomedes, Philopator and Aurelius Heraclides, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Emphasizes the amount of activity in physics and logic as well as in ethics.

Dio’s account of the second century AD, the ‘Antonine period’ broadly construed, has not received the same attention when compared with the better-preserved Julio-Claudian books or the exciting contemporary narrative of the Severan age. This chapter examines Dio’s portrayal of five second-century emperors: Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus and Pertinax. It focuses particularly on the role that military qualities (or lack thereof) played in the historian’s assessment of their character and reigns. In Dio’s view, the best emperors were not necessarily the best generals, but leaders who were able to maintain the frontiers in the face of foreign threats and kept the troops disciplined and ready for defence at all time. A good emperor should be an all-rounder, able to balance attention to military matters with concern for the civilian government of the empire. In the second-century narrative, it is Marcus Aurelius who best embodies these qualities.

The scholarly conclusions regarding Paul’s relationship with Hellenistic philosophy center around the parallels between Paul and contemporary philosophers (e.g., Seneca or Epictetus) or philosophies (e.g., Stoicism, Middle Platonism, Epicureanism, etc.), each with varying theses on Paul’s uncritical consumption of such philosophies or his savvy redeployment of Hellenism. Aside from encyclopedic convictions that often fund such comparisons, differences between Paul and Hellenism are discussed less often.What if his dispositions and diatribes could be related to his view of the prophetic office undergirding Hebraic philosophy as easily as they could to the rhetoric of the cynic or stoic? This chapter will suggest that Paul’s style of philosophy is largely Hebraic. However, because Paul’s epistles are audience-centric in their formation, so, too, the style is often garbed in Hellenistic philosophy. Nevertheless, the Hebraic style of philosophy is what drives his effort.

This chapter provides an examination of an ideal shared across languages and cultures in the second century: the ideal of the ‘deliberate speaker’, who aims to reflect time, thought, and study in his speech, and who draws attention to his words quawords. Articulate and educated speech becomes a vital tool for creating and defending in-groups in this period. By contrast, orators and authors in both Latin and Greek condemn their opponents as producing mere noise. The ideal of the deliberate speaker is explored through the works of two very different contemporaries: the African-born Roman orator Fronto and the Syrian Christian apologist Tatian. Despite moving in very different circles, Fronto and Tatian both express their identity and authority through an expertise in words, in strikingly similar ways. The chapter ends with a call for scholars of the Roman Empire to create categories of analysis that move across different cultural and linguistic groups. If we do not, we risk merely replicating the parochialism and insularity of our sources.