This chapter has two purposes. First, it outlines the problems of and methods for finding the popular voice in our evidence from Roman antiquity. Utilising James C. Scott’s paradigm of hidden transcripts, this chapter argues that wider perceptions of the Roman emperor can be excavated from a wide-range of different material. Second, the chapter explores the history and historiography of the Roman emperor and how the power of the Roman emperor has been described and understood in antiquity and beyond.

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 argues that Chariton’s Chaereas and Callirhoe is exceptional among the extant novels for its ideological entanglement with Rome, a status in no small part a result of the author’s opening proclamation to be from the city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor, a ciuitas libera and perennially loyal pet of the Roman emperors. The first section of this chapter suggests that the novel’s fictional status affords it a degree of licence to ‘speak truth to power’, evidence of which can often be found in details that do not quite make sense (‘glitches in the matrix’). The second section mobilises a range of theoretical models from resistance studies to argue that one such detail, the presence of ‘Phrygian pirates’, represents a sideswipe at Roman military and imperial pretensions. The third section presses the interpretative potential of Chariton’s claim to be from Aphrodisias and argues that, although a strongly local text, it is irredeemably enmeshed in the politics of the Mediterranean world. The fourth section explores how the public use of Phrygian iconography in Aphrodisias as a strategy of ‘kinship diplomacy’ with Rome contrasts with the negative connotations of ‘Phrygian’ in Chariton’s novel, which indicates that even a city as openly pro-Roman as Aphrodisias was capable of expressing dissent.

The book concludes with the largest implications for the Charleston slave workhouse rebellion. It relies on the work of historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot to explain why the revolt has been silenced for more than 171 years. Trouillot determined that silences occur at four important moments in the process of historical production: fact creation (the making of sources), fact assembly (the making of archives); fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). The newspapers downplayed the incident (the making of sources). The historical archives have not been concerned with collecting material on the revolt because they remained unaware of its occurrence (making of archive). The few historians that have written about the incident have misunderstood the incident. Francis Colburn Adams wrote a slave narrative about Nicholas and his half-sister that includes a depiction of the workhouse revolt. Yet nobody has made that connection until now.