There's always some controversy happening on social media. Sometimes it's an ambiguously colored dress, or a YouTuber turns out to have a more exciting personal life than they've let on. In September 2023, it was the revelation that "most" men think regularly about Ancient Rome, to the bemusement of their partners.
I put "most" in quotes because presumably some men are denying that they think about Rome, and therefore not being recorded on TikTok. But as is the way with such things, the ones who do are taken as evidence that all of us do.
Regardless of how prevalent it actually is, the tone in the thinkpieces discussing the meme is of affectionate bemusement at the idea of thinking about Ancient Rome at all. Sometimes it's attributed to toxic masculinity, but overall it seems to be treated as this funny thing that guys do.
Well, I can confirm that I'm also a guy who thinks about Ancient Rome quite a lot. Part of it is patriotic pride: as an Italian, the Roman Empire sometimes feels like the only time we aren't seen as corrupt buffoons or louche aesthetes. In contrast to how Italians are seen now, people think it was full of manly men doing manly things like conquering Britain and, er, slaughtering Germanic tribes (sorry about that, Northern Europeans).
There's an age component to this too. I suspect that popular historians like Antony Beevor owe their entire careers to men like me who've reached the age where it suddenly seems important to know what happened at Stalingrad or during the Punic Wars, and have the financial wherewithal to shell out for five hundred-page tomes that describe them in excruciating detail.
I also like thinking about the parallels between the Late Roman Republic and our own current moment. Rome's transition from a republic, however limited the franchise, to a corrupt and violent despotism wracked by centuries of civil war, is instructive for those of us who don't want to see the US go the same way. Unfortunately, too many other people who think about the Roman Empire a lot actually would like to see the US go down that path.
I should note right here that I'm not any kind of expert on Ancient Rome. My knowledge of that subject comes, in descending order of how much I've retained, from Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast, Asterix comics, family trips to Rome in the 1980s and 90s, Ridley Scott's Gladiator and Mary Beard's SPQR. I haven't read any primary sources, like Tacitus, Cassius Dio or Suetonius, nor have I made much headway with Stoic philosophy, despite it having had a bit of a moment here in the Silicon Valley in the last decade.
But not being an expert is, to my mind, precisely why it's worthwhile to consider the similarities of Rome's slide into authoritarianism with our own. All you have to do is describe an unequal society, with elites that grew more interested in consolidating their own power than in civic engagement, and you already see the parallels between late-republican Rome and the contemporary US.
It's also not much of a stretch to imagine parallels between certain people in our own era and in theirs. For example, if Donald Trump or Elon Musk had been alive then, it's easy to imagine them earning their riches in much the same way Marcus Crassus did. A member of the First Triumvirate alongside Julius Caesar and Pompey, and the richest man in Rome, Crassus made most of his money through speculative real estate purchases, stakes in silver mines and slave trafficking, but his side hustle really takes the cake. He apparently set up Rome's first fire brigade, but he only put out fires if the owner sold the property to him at a discount. He'd then rent the rebuilt properties back to their original owners.
Leaving aside comparisons to contemporary troublemakers, the story of Crassus, and the ongoing fascination with the Emperors of Rome, comes down to the fact that there are just so many colorful characters. Caligula made his horse a senator; three centuries later Valentinian died of apoplexy after furiously haranguing a diplomatic delegation; in between them Vespasian made light of the tradition of deifying emperors after death, with his last words, "Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god." He died of dysentery.
That said, these characters were able to be colorful because, as emperors, they had unlimited power. They only had unlimited power because Julius Caesar and a number of other generals put their ambition ahead of respecting Rome's rules. When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, bringing his armies into Italy, he was doing something that centuries of precedent in Roman law hadn't considered a loyal general might do. When Donald Trump claims, against all evidence, that he's the rightful winner of the 2020 election, he's following a long tradition.
Speaking of Trump, do you know who else is thinking about Ancient Rome? The extreme right. Though they aren't just thinking about Ancient Rome. They also like the Spartans, thanks in part to Zack Snyder's 2007 film 300 and the 1998 comic by Frank Miller from which it is adapted. Comments by both Snyder and Miller seem to refute links to the "clash of civilizations" that was in vogue during those years after 9/11, but many critics have drawn the parallel between the white Spartans and the non-white (and monstrous) Persian army.
Snyder and Miller aren't the first to portray the Spartans as the Classical equivalent of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. That myth goes back to Roman times – which I suppose means that what Roman men thought about several times a day was the Spartans. Historian and fantasy author Myke Cole devoted an entire book, The Bronze Lie, to dismantling this myth of Spartan martial prowess. From what he could tell, the myth seems to come from the fact that Sparta was the only Greek city-state that actually trained for war from time to time.
You sometimes get the sense Cole is tilting at windmills, including when he criticizes the overabundance of the "moron label", as he calls the Molon Labe tattoo that shows up on a lot of Second Amendment activists' arms. Molon Labe being Ancient Greek for "Come and take them", which is what the Spartans apparently said in response to a Persian demand to lay down their arms.
Cole isn't the only writer combating some of the myths that we have about the ancient world. Many scholars push back on the idea that Ancient Greece and Rome were "white", an idea that comes from the Enlightenment. They argue that our conceptions of race wouldn't have made sense to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, whose populations drew from ethnic and cultural groups from all over the Mediterranean. Still, this hasn't deterred White Nationalists, Nazis and other accelerationists from linking the supposed whiteness of the Classical world to Victorian conceptions of Whiteness, which get sanitized into the concept of "Western civilization".
According to Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (and the sister of one Mark Zuckerberg), the far-right sees Ancient Greece and Rome as racially pure, patriarchal societies that were superior to our own supposedly decadent multiculturalism. The irony is that Rome became even more unstable after it transitioned from a republic to an empire.
The period in which Augustus ruled is held up as one of the golden ages of Rome, and the Empire hit its peak more than a century later under the so-called Five Good Emperors (not all of whom were good, and there weren't five of them). There were several violent transitions in that period, notably 69 AD, the Year of Four Emperors, but Nerva, the first "Good Emperor" was also installed thanks to a coup.
That point gets glossed over because of worse times later: there would be a Year of Five Emperors and a Year of Six Emperors, with pretenders to the throne popping up all over the Empire for the next few centuries. One emperor got the post because the Praetorian Guard murdered his predecessor and then auctioned the throne off to the highest bidder. The reign of Augustus may have ended the chaos of the Late Republic, but its genesis as a murderous power struggle meant that the Empire would always be vulnerable to whichever general or governor could get enough legions to support him.
Despite that, there are still many who fetishize Augustus. A number of personalities at the Claremont Institute, like Donald Trump's former advisor Michael Anton, have floated the idea of a Caesar-like figure, "halfway between monarchy and tyranny", who would be able to pull the US away from what they perceive as everything wrong with the country: wokeness, transgenderism, censorship, etc. The concept is called Caesarism or Red Caesarism.
Augustus has fans beyond extreme rightwing White House advisors. None other than Mark Zuckerberg is said to be a huge fan of the first Emperor, even apparently modeling his haircut on the Roman style sported by Julius Caesar, Augustus, and any number of dapper early Empire gentlemen. In a 2018 interview Zuckerberg mused to the New Yorker that Augustus established world peace "through a really harsh approach". This isn't to imply that Zuckerberg wants to make that tradeoff, but it's a little worrying that the man who gave us the Cambridge Analytica scandal is weighing the pros and cons. Mike Duncan's response to this, when interviewed by Rolling Stone, was to note that this "isn't great. Because just for the record, Augustus was kind of a sociopathic murderer."
The thing that jumps out to me about the whole "thinking about Rome" bit is that, if we're talking analogies, we're probably just at the first stage of the collapse of the Republic, when some of those great generals were finding they enjoyed being dictators. Julius Caesar is famous because of Shakespeare's play, and his ties to Augustus, and the fact that his assassination, instead of ending the crisis, brought it to the point of civil war.
Augustus took advantage of the Roman fear of kings – very much like ours – to call himself "princeps" or first citizen. He wrapped himself up in familiar iconography to assure the Romans that he wasn't doing what he was clearly doing. Crucially, he also managed to stop the wars tearing Rome apart.
However, his taking power ultimately was the start of Rome's chaos, not the end, and it'll be the same if the US falls into Caesarism. That's something worth thinking about three times a day, and not just for men.
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