If the question hasn’t already appeared on your Twitter feed, For You page, or group chat, it soon will: How frequently do you consider the Roman Empire? The origin of the query is a little hazy, but it might have started with this TikTok or this tweet (which also makes mention of an Instagram Reel). maybe this one. The fact is that everyone is attempting to ascertain how frequently the guys in their lives consider the Roman Empire.
You will be “shocked with their responses,” says one of the ur-TikToks that @paige.elysee shared earlier this week. The reactions, though, are just… intriguing, if my friends and the WIRED Culture Slack are any indicator. I posed the query to group chats yesterday, and the majority of the responses tended to be variations of “Is this that Twitter poll? lol” or “I got asked this last night.” Definitely never. So they weren’t startling, but they were definitely funny. The Roman Empire is to males what girl dinner is to women, other coworkers generously intervened, adding, “My theory is that it’s due to the Daily Stoic podcast is so popular.”
When writing about Mark Zuckerberg, Steven Levy, a legend of WIRED, said, “Every time I think about Ancient Rome.” The response, however, seems to be more along the lines of “every single day,” “once a week,” or “a few times a month,” according to folks who aren’t my pals.
I chose to survey my WIRED coworkers. People of all identities may be history nerds, y’all! So, in my opinion, gendering this question is sort of stupid, but perhaps that’s a discussion for another time. Although responses are still coming in on the impromptu Google Form I set out as of this writing, around a fifth of respondents in a group with a good gender mix indicated that they “never” thought about the Roman Empire. In a tie with “weekly,” “never,” and “monthly,” respectively, “never” and “monthly” were selected by roughly 15% of respondents.
More than a few respondents in my extensive, all-day investigation pointed to the Cold War, Pompeii, or the 1920s as eras more deserving of thought. This ultimately inspired me to come up with a theory: Guys/people tend to think more about Roman-related media than they do about the Roman Empire. The Colosseum-themed video games, vintage movies like Cleopatra, the roughly one million History Channel docuseries, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian are all ingrained in our memories. Because Gladiator was so well-liked, Jay-Z was able to include Russell Crowe’s “Are you not entertained?” at the start of “What More Can I Say.”
My own reflections on ancient Rome typically center on the persecution of Christians and the empire’s adoption of Christianity following Constantine. I then consider Keanu Reeves. In response to my group text question, one of my former editors mentioned that she had recently viewed Domina and Rome on Amazon Prime Video to “contrast the characterizations of Octavian’s wife during the Second Triumverate.” After that, I Googled this and created my own personal rabbit hole.
The media landscape in 2023 will look like this. Hollywood, eager to adapt any tale it can, has turned history into IP, creating series and movies that we now watch while holding our phones in one hand and having our laptops open to research each new information that appears onscreen. Who among us hasn’t spent hours checking the accuracy of The Trial of Chicago 7 or the KGB page on Wikipedia after binge-watching The Americans? Hours of content concerning World War II are available on any streaming provider. I once wrote a paper on Alan Turing’s “Bombe” code-cracking device after watching The Imitation Game. I suppose Turing is my Roman Empire. (Let me know what you think about the Apple logo.)
The cliche is that the victor always writes history. In contrast, it is frequently “punched up” in current times by studio suggestions after being translated by screenwriters. People frequently have an obsession with the past. Respondents sought to understand why anyone was even talking about men and the Roman Empire in the first place as my text and Slack chats grew longer. The conversation veered off into inquiries about why people are so fascinated by battle, strong guys in general, and so forth. No one has ever been able to explain why the meme became so popular or whether males actually do think about the Roman Empire more than those of other genders. However, we had fun.