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.
Per Dr Eleanor Janega, Rome guys are continuing the Roman tradition of pondering the last ‘cool’ empire. Romans pondered the Greeks, now Americans ponder Rome. I think a lot of the Rome/Greek pondering in America was about justifying slavery. Hence why there’s a Parthenon in Nashville. The Romans were a “democracy” with a slave underclass, so it’s actually cool and normal to do that.
certainly worth pointing to the amount of roman legal scholarship trying to make sense of slave ownership as well
Need a version of the “this is fine” gif but instead of fire it’s a household of enslaved people and instead of a dog it’s a Roman guy and/or Rome Guy
Oh god does that mean there will be US ponderers as well after the empire has collapsed?
it's interesting that the British empire gets overlooked in this. structurally the US is far more similar to that than it is to Rome at any point in its history.
I think Britain-American relationship is a bit unique because the British did not collapse and then get re-discovered and idealized by the American nationalists. Instead we came from them, rebelled against them and then surpassed them - after WW2 and their defeat in the “Suez Canal Crisis” they officially handed off the financialized anglo naval trade empire to the Americans. In exchange they got to live the imperial core lifestyle but without any need to dirty their hands much. It’s the same empire continued and reformed, not a reactionary project out of whole cloth from our imaginations like Rome-boos did.
The British were Rome-boos and used it to justify their empire. Americans come from the British directly, a British offshoot that overtoook it so we are Rome-boos as well. The sacredness of Rome is part of the American civil religion, with Roman architecture and art style being mimicked for all the founding father propaganda and framing. Obviously they weren’t going to immediately start glorifying the British that they had just broken off from and had a rivalry with, so they had to reach back further.
yeah, the UK/US relationship is a bit more like rome vs constantinople :)
the empire remained (more or less), but the capital moved.
There was also the idealistic liberal view of the Roman Republic and its aristocracy as having a degree of stability and security for the elite that feudalism only guaranteed to a select few of the most special good boys the crown liked the most, and they wanted to create a system that protected themselves from an institutional power above themselves, the public, and each other.
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.
I always thought the obsession particularly with the late republic/early empire was a product of Christianity since it is basically the setting of the Christian Bible. The historical overlay on the one story they have any consistent exposure to makes it the only history that feels accessible. Then there is so much data and material out there that they never really get past it into any other period of history. Especially since that period of Rome gets merged into the Christian story, there really isn’t another ancient historical candidate that rests in their comfort zone.
not really. a) the republic was basically dead, Augustus & his successors kept up the pretense of republicanism but 18th century (gibbon) historiography made Augustus the First Emperor and the end of the republic
b) the early libs were not about christianity: the Yankee ones had to be centrists and avoid prot/cath conflicts so designed an on-paper secular government, the French liberals actually mostly dismantled the church. it kind of ruled.
I think the interest in Rome is not only a product of Christianity, but that the widespread adoption of Christianity was also product of Rome in the first place, since Rome was a tri-continental pan-Mediterranean empire that spanned Europe, north Africa, and west Asia, and Christianity picked up speed after their destruction of the 2nd temple and Jerusalem by Titus Flavius. Jewish-Roman historian Josephus (who was in Titus's court) and Roman historian Tacitus provide some of the earliest non-Christian accounts of Christianity, and Christianity spread so far because it was the religion of slaves, poor people, and women, especially former Jews (since Christianity started essentially as a Jewish sect of which there were many during the 2nd temple period), scattered throughout the Roman empire due to Roman conquest in Judea. Christianity became a prominent religion because of its elevation to the status of a state religion by a Roman emperor. If it weren't for Rome, Christianity would not have come into existence (both from a theological and a totally secular perspective Rome is essential to Christianity), would not have had a convenient political landscape to spread through, full of people (slaves) who were keen on its message of salvation in the afterlife for even the most persecuted people, etc.
'the' Romans.... but which Romans? it lasted for a long time and incorporated a lot of different tendencies....
it's the Romans's world we just live in it, so many things like the calendar, and Christianity via Constantine.... it's hard to know what our world would be without the Romans....
I like those anti-Romans like the Huns and Barbarians, K-dawg does a good treatment of them here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/ch04.htm
these are just random thoughts with no conclusion
i should've specified, the middle republic to the division of east and west, then through to the end of the west - but ESPECIALLY in modern times the utter dominance of the late republic and early empire. I am familiar the byzantines got up to some shit, but i'm frankly way less studied there, and they have next to no capture of the western mind the way early imperial rome does
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95
because he's talking about Napoleon III he doesn't extend the context far back enough, but this is exactly what the Dutch Republic & Yankkke Republic were smoking.
you gotta understand that a national "democratic" rule hadn't been seen in europe since the roman republic, it's very explicable why they'd choose it for their model (Athens was out for being too populist by 18th century standards, lol)
and finally, Romanism isn't actually married to Rome. again, Marx hits it out the ballspark by identifying this is a mostly aesthetic relationship looking for symbols: the fasces for instance, the phrygian cap, not looking for actual policy suggestions from history: "In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation."--James Madison, refering to Lex Agraria of the Gracchi as something to be avoided
but honestly what's with the glorification of Rome?
It's the biggest cracker (adjacent) empire that existed before 1492
(even though italians got lynched and actual romans were browner than modern italians)
They obsess over Rome because Rome was a first major (sorta) European polity. Never mind that Rome was closer to a Mediterranean civilization than a European one or that the Western European parts of Rome were complete backwaters or that the link between Rome and the WestTM is far more tenuous than Romeaboos think (The WestTM is linked more to the Carolingian Empire and the Franks than the Rome and the Romans). But the Carolingian Empire is only around 1500 years old, so when you compare that with the Chinese or the Iranian who have millennia old empires that have long existed before the Franks as a distinct ethnic group even existed, of course there's going to be much malding and coping that the Chinese/Iranian/Indian had massive empires while the Franks were still living in huts. And while the Romeaboo can handwave Sumeria no longer existing or modern Egyptians having nothing to do with ancient Egyptians, they can't as easily handwave Iran or India away and they 100% can't handwave China away.
Same as it ever was. Mideval dudes were super into Rome as well. People who like empires look up to the biggest empire that existed most recently that white people were involved in.
I feel like most media portrays Rome as the shitty, backstabbing, fascist hellhole that it was, but in much the same way as chuds look at the Nazis and go, "wowsers, cool uniforms", they look at Romans and go, "wowsers, cool uniforms".
