A year on, it’s still going on. The Roman Empire is still big online. Men are still thinking about it, anything from a couple of times a day to three or four times a month, or possibly twice a year.
We got this fun fact courtesy of Swedish TikTok influencer Saskia Cort, who asked her followers to ask their boyfriends how often they thought about the Roman Empire. She, and they, were startled to find out how often this was the case. Mind you, the present trend may be less a result of men thinking spontaneously about the age of the Caesars and more to do with the fact that this is a thing online. Still, if men are even pretending, it tells us a good deal.
But let’s clear the ground, shall we? When men say they’re thinking about the Roman Empire, what they mean (is this what’s called mansplaining?) is that they’re thinking about Rome. And as a friend correctly observed, the Roman Republic was more admirable than the Roman Empire in ethos and constitution: a nice balance between plebs, middle classes and grandees. All that austere Roman virtue, the Horatius on the Bridge stuff: that’s Republican.
The Roman Empire was the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office
Anyway, Rome. As historic periods go it’s unsurprising that it trumps the frightful Vikings. As the historian Tom Holland observed, the Roman Empire was “the apex predator of antiquity: powerful, terrifying, box-office”. And by box office, think Gladiator.
The good things about Rome, if you must gender things, were masculine. What made their troops formidable was the discipline inculcated by drill and austerities. The word for courage, for virtue, derives from “man”. The ethos of Rome was masculine, unlike, as they saw it, the effeminates in Persia. There were victims — let’s just say Julius Caesar would get short shrift now — but they just live on in Asterix. As for the achievements of Rome, what is there about straight roads, aqueducts, sanitation, law and public order that’s not to like?
So, why not women? Personally, I am gender fluid here: Mary Beard and I.
A friend pondered what the equivalent online obsession for women would be: murder podcasts, she said. Sad, no?
