sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 6

Lisa Pilar Eberle / Myles Lavan (eds.): Unrest in the Roman Empire

The history of empire is a history of epistemes. Dominant powers - like, say, Rome - do not just extract resources from subject communities but also impose upon those communities particular ways of thinking through the world. This is not to say that the Roman Mediterranean was a place of cognitive conformity, and our textual record still reveals distinctive habits of mind that mark Roman, Greek, Jewish, and other communities as such. But writers from all of these traditions worked within a paradigm underlay by Roman force, and faced powerful incentives to describe conflicts in terms that would be acceptable to the men who won them.

That discursive tendency poses challenges for historians, and Unrest in the Roman Empire tackles them head-on to great effect. Lisa Eberle and Myles Lavan, the co-editors of the volume, have a particular interest in the Denkwelt of empire: in how Romans and their subjects perceived the world around them, and in how the power relations of the ancient Mediterranean structured that perception. That intellectualizing habit gives Unrest a novel focus. Rather than trying to reconstruct the reality of provincial resistance to Roman power, the volume tracks "revolt narratives as narratives" (in Lavan's words, at 175). This exploration of the "prose of counterinsurgency" (12, quoting Ranajit Guha) takes two rough forms. Some chapters are essentially lexical, considering the particular phrasings historians use to portray resistance to the dominant Roman order and how they fit into broader historiographical projects. Others focus on broader storytelling tendencies within these tales of unrest, and consider them as something like a literary genre with its own conventions and restrictions. The methodological difference is notable, but the contributions all add up to an engaging and stimulating whole.

Unrest begins with an introduction by Eberle and Lavan, laying out the volume's methodological commitments and debt to more contemporary work like that of Guha and Stephen Justice. The first main chapter is by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, on the Book of Daniel as a kind of parable of subjection. From there, the volume returns to Roman shores with Carsten Hjort Lange's treatment of the language of bellum civile in both Latin and Greek historiography. The first contribution to center on Roman Greece is that of Benjamin Gray, whose chapter considers how Greek concepts of homonoia and eirēnē evolved to fit the very different Romanocentric order of the imperial period, and how authors of the Second Sophistic melded Greek and Roman ideas of peace to generate a language of civic harmony and stability that could fairly describe their own times. Katell Berthelot next addresses Josephus, and how he carefully positions the first-century Jewish revolt as not only catastrophic for the Jewish people, but as so contrary to Jewish values that Jewish elites can plausibly join with Romans in condemning it. Hans Kopp's chapter thinks of unrest from a different perspective, considering conflicts within the Roman army and the challenge they pose towards dominant narratives of unit cohesion and loyalty.

From here, we turn to Lisa Eberle's chapter, which is one of the most intriguing of the bunch. Eberle focuses on Appian, but uses him as the staging ground for an ambitious reimagining of provincial resistance tout court. Eberle argues that Appian's focus on "aporetic unrest" (153) reflects his particular attention to the material causes of resistance. This quasi-Marxist approach is modern, sophisticated, and - a task previously thought impossible - makes Appian interesting. Myles Lavan then contraposes revolt and criminality in authors from Cicero to Cassius Dio, considering how Roman law came to operate as a hegemonic discourse that could recast resistance to Roman power as crime against that power.

The next two chapters both skew late, thinking about unrest and revolt in the very different discursive environment of late antiquity. First, Bruno Pottier tracks narratives of banditry in the fourth century CE, arguing that they rendered usurpers and separatists legible within existing Roman discursive structures. Next, James Corke-Webster considers how resistance and revolt underlie persecution narratives and apologetic; these stories are often read in a specifically religious context, but speak to broader concerns about Roman tyranny and the power of subaltern communities to destabilize earlier ways of speaking and knowing.

Ulriika Vihervalli then returns us to the Principate with her discussion of violence against women in Roman literature. Vihervalli shows the primitivizing function of misogynist violence in Roman imaginaries, and how Romans cast attacks against women as a mark of uncivilized, brutal tribes. Finally, Natalie Dohrmann ends the volume where it began - in the complex, shifting relationship between divine and Roman power that undergirds Jewish literature. Her chapter focuses on rabbinics, and how rabbis use what we would now call rule-of-law theory to accommodate Jewish practices to Roman hegemony.

All in all, the volume is remarkably coherent given its geographical and temporal breadth. These diverse contributors never feel like they are playing in different sandboxes; all chapters discuss conflict between Roman power and local actors, and share a commitment to critically examining how that conflict appears in literary records of the imperial period. Unrest is more amenable to cover-to-cover reading than your average edited volume, and nothing struck me as out of place. That said most readers will inevitably focus on particular regions, and the different methodological commitments required for different types of sources mean that the volume naturally sorts itself out into subcategories.

For example, I found myself considering the chapters on Jewish approaches to unrest (by Padilla Peralta, Berthelot, and Dohrmann) as something of a unit, and an excellent one. All three chapters are highlights, and their insights into Jewish literature of the period are my most exciting takeaway from Unrest. This may partly reflect how well Unrest's concerns fit within the Jewish corpus, since that corpus is generically diverse and tremendously anxious to rewrite Jewish/Roman interactions in the Second Temple period. But scattering these chapters through a more organically structured volume is no great harm, and specialists could still learn a thing or two from the chapters that fall outside their particular regional foci. Overall, Unrest is a great read and a real resource for scholars of Roman imperialism. I recommend it enthusiastically, and am eager to see how its ideas shape the subfield in coming years.