I've had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that's kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they're one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn't be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i'm not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.

Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it's obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what's with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can't be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It's hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don't ever think something like "Augustus was a role model" unless you've got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.

It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome's decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I've never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear's thoughts.

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    1 month ago

    Ancient Rome is an important part of the anglosphere nationalist mythology. History was the Greeks, then the Romans, then the Renaissance, then the British, then the Americans. It's not a coherent model of history, it's a series of backwards-looking movements attempting to define a nationalist identity by glorifying a past civilization and declaring yourself to be the spiritual successor state. Reactionaries from other cultural spheres have these too, but the Roman one is a bit special because it daisy chains so many of them in a row that you get across the planet.

    Rome is also an important part of historical study because the ancient Romans were bureaucratic as hell and left behind loads of written records, and successor states considered many of their works important enough to preserve (in part because of and in part causing the Roman role in nationalist myth). It's not the start of the available written record, but if you go back any further, or even forward, you're dealing with a poverty of sources. We know the broad strokes of mythologies and names of kings in the area and space and time around the ancient Romans, and then for the Romans we can know how a given consul was screwing up at collecting taxes in a given year.

    And those two aspects are in massive tension with each other. The nationalist guys want there to be study of Rome because it's important and obviously that should exist. But it's also 2000 years ago and the ancient Romans were so far from modern value systems that reactionaries can't handle knowing what they were actually like (misogynistic, bigoted, and violent, but also very gay and completely unconcerned with skin color). And I think that part is fun.