ByAmy Briggs
Published September 25, 2023
• 5 min read
A TikTok craze is telling me that people want to know what men think about when they think about Rome. Unlike most TikTok trends, this one does not seem strange to me at all. But then again, it’s my job to think about Rome.
So what is going on with the latest TikTok trend? For starters, it’s not one thing. It’s many things.
How many “Roman Empire” things still resonate with people?
It’s hard to read a question like this one and not immediately jump to that Life of Brian scene when John Cleese growls “What have the Romans ever done for us?” and all the disgruntled Judeans rattle off a bunch of great Roman achievements—the aqueduct, sanitation, roads, medicine, wine… It’s a magnificent joke, but it’s funny because it’s true.
So sure, they are amazing achievements, but I think there’s another reason why they continue to resonate. They are still here. It’s because there are so many we can still see and interact with the aqueducts, roads, monuments, temples, theaters and stadiums, works of art, and literature.
This isn’t some lost city or vanished people. The remnants of this culture are everywhere waiting to be devoured.
And you don’t have to go to Italy to see them (although that is quite nice). They’re out there in Britain, Europe, Africa, and western Asia.
But why men specifically? What’s your take?
Many of the men I know who are thinking a lot about Rome seem to be most interested in two things: engineering and the military. Rome has those in spades. Rome marches across the vast territory, creates an empire, and then plants large public works all over it that need to be defended.
So it’s filled with big projects—like the temples, the roads, and aqueducts—that not only require an innovative design, but also a big, complex labor force. Contemplating the who, what, when, where of building these things and then replicating that all over the Empire with the existing technology? It’s just a really fun thought exercise.
Same thing goes for the military—how do you organize, discipline, arm, clothe, and house your forces all over the Empire—sometimes in hostile territories? If you were plonked down in the middle of the Roman Empire, how would you do it? What would your life be like?
But why the Empire?
Information about the Roman Empire is so accessible. There’s no shortage of material from that time to consume. Julius Caesar writes detailed commentaries about his campaigns, but keep in mind, he wrote these for public consumption. They provide an amazing window into what Caesar thought the Roman citizens thought was important at the time.
If you want something more personal, there are the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which was a journal he kept when fighting Germanic tribes on the Danube. It’s full of advice to himself and is still considered a popular self-help book today.
Roman men liked to write, and they did a lot of it, and then over time, the people who were obsessed with Rome wrote a lot about them and their times. The Founding Fathers of the United States were one of those groups. They adopted Roman aliases when writing their 18th-century pamphlets and op-eds.
For example, The authors of the Federalist Papers published under the pseudonym “Publius,” after a founder of the Roman Republic. They read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume I published in 1776—what timing!) and fretted that their republic would follow the fate of the licentious Roman Empire.
This trend continues to bubble up throughout U.S. history to this day. So it’s not just a dude thing (Ahem. See Mary Beard, Nandini Pandey, and Sarah Derbew for starters).
It’s also a very American thing to think about Rome.
So engineering, military, and literature. Anything else?
At the heart of it, I think the Roman Empire stays popular—with both men and women—for a far more basic reason: the Roman Empire is full of good stories. Books, TV, and movies are full of them: Ben Hur; Cleopatra; Julius Caesar; I, Claudius; Gladiator; HBO’s Rome.
Compelling situations, political intrigue, dysfunctional families, and a growing empire as a backdrop—Don’t we all think about this stuff all the time in our fiction? Our history is full of it, too. And I think it’s all the more compelling because it’s not made up. It really happened.
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