There’s a viral meme going around where women ask their husband or boyfriend (any significant male acquaintance will work) how often they think about the Roman Empire. If you’re a woman, you’re likely to be surprised by the answer.
The answers typically range from weekly to several times a day. The matter-of-factness of the men responding is entertaining, as are the looks of surprise and disbelief on the faces of the querying women. The answer is usually followed by another question, like “Why?” or “What about the Roman Empire are you thinking about?”
The answers vary. Different aspects of the Roman Empire seem to appeal to different men. The military is frequently mentioned. As are architectural feats like the Colosseum, the aqueducts, and Roman roads. In some cases, the question evokes a lecture on Roman history. A term has been invented for the reaction this question provokes in some men: “Romansplaining”. The hashtag #romanempire now has over a billion views on TikTok.
I showed this meme to my wife (who had not seen it) and my Gen Z daughter (who had), and told them I probably thought about the Roman Empire several times a week. We spent the next hour playing a game where they mentioned some random feature of modern culture and we tried to link it to the Roman Empire in one or two degrees of separation. It’s surprising what you come up with.
All of this apparently started with an Instagram post and was picked up on TikTok and elsewhere.
I actually think men’s fascination with the Roman Empire (at least American men) explains a lot about our society. Rome was, after all, an epitome of patriarchy, imperialism, mass enslavement, and social stratification–all of the things that made capitalism possible.
I suspect this is largely an American thing and especially a White American thing. And I’m wondering if it’s a generational thing too. I’m a Gen X’er, as are many men in these videos. My dad, who is on the transition point of the Silent Generation and the Boomers (but very much identifies as the former), did not relate to the meme at all. For him (and I think his generation), their preoccupation is with the “Founding Fathers” and WWII.
My own interest in the Roman Empire started with a term paper on Roman military tactics that I wrote my senior year of high school. As a pagan, I had even more than the usual interest in ancient Rome, since we have more information about Greco-Roman religion that probably any other ancient pagan religion. But there’s one more reason why the Roman Empire is on my mind a lot lately … collapse.
The Roman Empire is perhaps best known for its demise. Many books have been filled with explanations for why Rome fell. There’s even debates about when exactly it fell. But fall it did. And living today, past the peak of our own empire, looking down the slope of civilizational decline, it’s a natural segue to the most well-documented civilizational collapse in history.
The year that is often given for collapse of the Roman Empire is 476 CE, when the last Western Roman emperor was deposed. But the process had actually begun centuries earlier. “Rome did not collapse in a day.” The decline was long and staggered. And Roman culture continued to have an influence after 476, which is why so many men today are thinking about it still.
The factors which are associated with the collapse of the Roman Empire should sound familiar:
- climatic change (including a Little Ice Age)
- pandemic/plague
- the debasement of Roman currency
- increasing centralization of the state and growth of bureaucracy
- the rise of a millennialist (end of times) religion, Christianity
- massive migration (driven by the Huns)
- military failures
Every one of these has its contemporary corollary. In his 2008 book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Cullen Murphy identified six ways in which Roman Empire and the American empire are similar:
“an exaggerated sense of self importance coupled with a myopic view of the world; a military overstretched and alienated from civilian society; an imprudent rush toward the privatization of public services; a mounting struggle to police borders; and, finally, the inherent impossibility of managing an environment of such burgeoning complexity.”
My own favorite theory explaining civilizational collapse, borrowed from Peter Turchin, is the over-production of elites, which causes elites to turn on themselves and use the masses as weapons against each other.
It would be wrong to call any of these “causes” though. The cause of civilizational decline is civilization itself. This is what civilizations do. They grow, and grow, and outgrow their material and symbolic resources. And, of course, this is true of the American empire and larger the empire of global capitalist oligarchs.
Which brings me to another symptom/cause of collapse: fascism. As civilization begins to collapse, resources become scarcer and our collective narratives break down. Fascism rushes in to fill the void. We’re already seeing this happening.
When I asked my son about this (he’s on the line between Millennials and Gen Z), and he drew the connection between young men disoriented about gender roles, the idealization of the Roman Empire, and the appeal of fascism. The Roman Empire been an inspiration for many modern fascists. My son compared it to Boomer men who are obsessed with World War II, but just Nazi side of it.
When I think about it now, it’s obvious: This phenomenon appears to be almost exclusively male, almost exclusively White, almost exclusively American, and it’s about the idealization of an empire which was based on colonialism and mass enslavement/exploitation (as are all empires) and, depending on the time in question, either was a plutocracy or an outright dictatorship–of course it’s fascistic!
Which makes me all the more concerned about this phenomenon. Most of the men in these videos are idealizing the Roman Empire. In spite of its colonialism, slavery, and authoritarianism. A few are probably idealizing it because of those things. The problem here isn’t that White American men are thinking about the Roman Empire. It’s whatever it is about White American men that makes the Roman Empire appealing to them. The answer should be obvious: patriarchy, militarism, colonialism, authoritarianism–in a word, hierarchy.
Another End of the World is Possible 
This is interesting, because if someone asked me the same question, I would also say every week!
Mind you, I live alongside Roman ruins here in Lancashire NW England.
The Roman history of Lancashire is quite poorly detailed. We know that the locals didn’t agree with Roman rule, so the area became very depopulated by Roman retribution. Post-Roman collapse detail is even sparser after the Romans left. Latest archeology suggests that many people moved here from eastern England as the Scandinavians moved in there, which implies the depopulation was still a thing 500 years later. At some point Lancashire became part of the Cumbrian empire to the north.
But why do I think of Romans every week? Because, I certainly feel that their leaving the British Isles was akin to collapse for the many English that had adapted and adopted Roman customs, and suddenly their sponsors were gone. And with it civilisation as people knew it, hence the term Dark Ages. Although it is now considered that the “dark ages” were anything but – for the average peasant, if your taxation overlords suddenly bugger off, then you’re not being taxed. For a bit at least, until some local warlord or chieftain takes over. It was only a dark ages for the elites that left for Rome, and their elites left behind. Suddenly they weren’t so elite anymore, and they are the ones who could write things down. For all we know there may have been a flourishing of local art, enterprise, religion and other societal markers, but little of it was written down, and what was written down was hearsay several hundred years later.
And this will be our lot again. As civilisation goes away, how the people here react and adapt will be akin to how people reacted and adapted once the Romans left the British Isles. Another rhyming of history perhaps.
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I’m a woman and I think about the Roman Empire at least several times a week, as do a lot of women in my life.
We spend a lot of time comparing the men in our lives and who run things now to the men back then. Not much difference. And at the end of the day I wonder why women don’t go all Lysistrata on your asses and stop providing kids for your misuse and abuse, but oh, wait, the men are making it illegal again for women to control whether or not to have kids.
I feel like this meme and this essay overlooks the glaring fact that probably just as many women think about these things. But most men, even (especially?) my left leaning brothers have the tendency to discount women as thinkers.
What do you think?
What if it’s a man identifying as a woman? Does that affect the question about thinking about the Roman Empire? Or are we not allowed to ask such questions? I know you think women who challenge gender identity (as it seeks to steamroll our hard won rights and spaces) are fascists, which is a laugh and a half. I guess we are not supposed to notice all the sexism and misogyny?
Just like Aristotle and Socrates, all our “thinking men” are as misogynistic now as they were then.
You know what i mostly am reminded of when comparing the now and the then? How sexually perverse and twisted men are, and how they foist it on women and kids and then try to brand it as natural and above reproach.
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