Resistance and revolt in the Roman empire have long been a subject of scholarly interest. Most research on this problem has been conducted in the mode of social history, trying to analyze the social origins and political motivations of ancient revolts. Unlike in other periods of history, however, the sources for such histories are rarely legal and administrative records but narrative accounts of such revolts preserved in the ancient literary record, meaning that the elite authors of these ancient literary accounts were engaged in the same enterprise as social historians are today: they too were trying to explain why and how certain groups of people challenged the place in the social order that those in power envisaged for them, a fact that social historians of resistance and rebellion in the Roman empire often fail to acknowledge. While the distinctive nature of the evidence for resistance and revolt in the Roman empire raises an important methodological concern - how can social histories of these phenomena avoid replicating the thought patterns of ancient texts’ elite authors? - it also offers a singular opportunity: to examine how ancient elite authors and their audiences identified, categorized and narrated instances of resistance in the Roman empire. The goal of this workshop is to excavate and critically analyze the histories of such ancient theorizing of unrest in the Roman empire from the republican period to Late Antiquity.
The event will take place at the Evangelisches Stift. If you are interested, please just come along! In case of questions, get in touch with Lisa Eberle (lisa.eberlespam prevention@uni-tuebinge.de) and Myles Lavan (mpl2spam prevention@st-andrews.ac.uk).
