Seriously why everyone want to be rome so bad? Like its okay to just be the leader of your own big murderous empire without having to rip off Caesar again

  • SteamedHamberder [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Are you familiar with the Brittanica Great Books? That’s the entire point- that a straight line of “The Classics” goes from Homer to Virgil to Chaucer to Shakespeare and eventually the Empire.

    • Barabas [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      There is a difference between claiming yourself to be a successor of Rome and studying the classics. The Romans also studied Greek literature and philosophy (much to the chagrin of early Romans I'm sure), but they didn't claim to be the successors to Alexander or Greece, they were measuring sticks much like Alexander kept being for every two bit general. This would change slightly towards the end of the Empire when they weren't really latin anymore, but still.

      Compare this to the HRE, Spain, Italy, Russia, Germany, France and let's not forget the USA who decided to build faux Roman temples all over the place.

      All in all, I think they're probably the least Rome fucking of the European empires.

      • Catiline [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Here's King William depicted as a Roman Emperor with Queen Mary on a coin minted from gold supplied by the Royal African Company.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:William_and_Mary_Two-Guineas.jpg

        A statue of King Charles II in Roman regalia.

        https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/Rhc-charles2.jpg

        And, as I linked earlier, the whole 'Emperor of India' thing.

        Hence, the title Kaisar-i-Hind was coined in 1876 by the orientalist G.W. Leitner as the official imperial title for the British monarch in India.[9] The term Kaisar-i-Hind means emperor of India in the vernacular of the Hindi and Urdu languages. The word kaisar, meaning 'emperor', is a derivative of the Roman imperial title caesar (via Persian, Turkish – see Kaiser-i-Rum), and is cognate with the German title Kaiser, which was borrowed from the Latin at an earlier date.

        They're all simps for Rome, I'm afraid.

        Edit: Not to mention the whole 'Britannia' thing which featured a Helleno-Roman personification of the British Empire prominently in colonial propaganda.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia

        • Barabas [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          I'm not sure why you're such a stickler for Kaisar-I-Hind when emperor is derived from Imperator. The moment someone claims to be an empire in romance or Germanic languages, there is some rome fucking in there.