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Ever wonder what your male partner is thinking about when he’s just staring off into space? Maybe it’s another woman. More likely, however, it’s just the Roman Empire.
The earliest known instance of the Roman Empire meme comes in September of 2022, via screenshots uploaded by Swedish Instagram influencer @saskiacort. She’d asked her followers (mostly women) to ask the men in their lives how often they thought about the Roman Empire.
Turns out the answer was, a lot. It was picked up by a Swedish news outlet, then the rest of the internet shortly thereafter.
About a year later, an English-speaking, self-described antiquity memer @gaiusflavius posted a video to his Instagram imploring women to ask the same thing. This is where we see it take off in English-speaking circles.
The following month, a plethora of TikToks were posted by women asking their men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. About half of them said they thought about it at least weekly. And they said this in an unsurprised way that makes it sound like it’s not an out-of-nowhere question.
Which, if you think about it, it’s not if you are thinking about it daily, which is really funny and also surprising if—like the other three-quarters of the population—you’re not. Part of the humor has to do with the specificity of the thing. Asking someone about their relationship to a government dead for a millenia and a half, and having them respond in the range of days to months, is funny.
But for those of us who do think about ancient Rome this much, it’s kind of baffling that this is so funny because we all took it for granted that this was a normal, albeit fleeting and minor, part of daily life.
Come across a crack in the road or a pothole? “The Romans had better roads and theirs lasted 2000 years.” Making a plate of pasta? “I wonder what the Romans did before the discovery of tomatoes.” Having an issue with your cranky boss? “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if we were all just Marcus Aurelius clones?” Maybe the absurd thing is to not think about the Roman Empire every so often.
This is anecdotal, but one TikToker noted that of all the men she surveyed, the ones who thought about the Roman Empire daily were the go-getters because they were thinking about it in the context of love, power, betrayal, and the like.
Over time, the term “my Roman Empire” came to mean any story, theme, person, or event that someone thinks about on a regular basis, to which trains of thought often lead back. And with it, came more memes.
Speaking of which, ancient Rome generally entered the pop culture discourse again in the summer of 2024 amid the leadup to the long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s classic Gladiator.
After watching a single trailer, some conspiratorial alt-right corners of the twitterverse billed the movie as “Thinly veiled anti-Western civilization nonsense.”
While other, less conspiratorial swaths of the online community saw it as an opportunity for another plain old fun movie weekend. With Gladiator 2 set to release on the same day as Jon M Chu’s Wicked, movie fans debated whether or not this was set to be yet another Barbenheimer phenomenon. A lot of people think ancient Romans fighting gladiators is cool.
One of Gladiator 2’s stars, Paul Mescal is on record saying he thinks about the Roman Empire all day every day.
So yeah. The Roman Empire may have fallen 1500 years ago, but if you’re one of the apparent 25% of the Western populace who thinks about it on a regular basis, it still feels pretty relevant today.
Memes often take off because they have shock value, and believe it or not, ancient Rome still has salience in the 21st century.
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