...But chances are that most people who spend any significant amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire are not thinking about concrete, nor gender variant history, city planning, bathhouses and latrines, how the misspellings of vulgar graffiti are used to reconstruct the history of the Romance languages, how Catullus 16 was basically the spiritual predecessor to "Ram Ranch", or all sorts of other genuinely interesting things about the wonders and woes of daily life thousands of years ago... But rather, most people will be thinking about sexy muscle men with spears and shields and racist fashy undertones.

Ancient people deserve better than that.

A lot of popular historical period and period-inspired (various fantasy settings or whatever) fiction tend to revolve around wars and stuff. I think we need more works like Pentiment that tries to connect modern people to the human side of history. Humans in the past were still little weird people like we are today, they just had very different material conditions.