You have probably seen the 4 words “My Roman Empire is..” all over your For You Page on TikTok. Social media users have taken this trend by storm, reminiscing on personal moments of their lives whether it be funny or downbeat. But how exactly did this trend begin? And why the Roman Empire? This trend originally began in 2022, after a Swedish social media influencer named Saskia Cort asked her followers to ask their male partners: “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” Cort asked this question because she was exploring heterosexual relationships after exclusively dating women. She wanted to know why men treated her so badly, and their exact thought process. Basically, her big question was: Why do men act the way they do? She specifically asked her followers: “What do straight, single men eat and think about?”
Many of her female followers replied that their boyfriends thought a lot about the Roman Empire and that it must be a common theme. So, why exactly do men think about the Roman Empire so much? Stereotypically, war is associated with masculinity. Men are drawn to battlefields and bloodshed, and that is a common theme in the Roman Empire. In my opinion, the recurring thought of the Roman Empire helps men reaffirm their masculine gender roles in society. However, in August 2023, the Roman Empire trend took a different turn. This is when the phrase began to refer to an event or recurring thought that people have. For example, someone on TikTok stated that “Highschool Musical was their Roman Empire.” This simply means that when they watched the movie, it became a significant event in their life and they think about it frequently.
Credit: @yanna2pussy on TikTok
To further discuss the origins of the Roman Empire trend, I interviewed one of the Latin teachers here at BHSEC Queens, Professor Marturano, but I will refer to her as Doctrix. Doctrix has extensive knowledge of the Roman Empire, so I thought it would be interesting to hear her opinion on this trend. She disagrees with the argument that only men think about the Roman Empire, because women frequently think about it as well. Doctrix had stated, “It is a stereotype that women don’t think about war, military history, or imperialism.”
Credit: History Skills
She believes that the trend had certain implications: women aren’t able to think about imperialism or colonialism because it wouldn’t interest them, which she thinks that it should. She posed the question, “Who is really left to suffer?” Men would be killed, and women and children would become enslaved. For women, enslavement meant sexual violence. This is why women should be thinking about the consequences of war and imperialism—because it had a direct effect on them.
Women were always present in the aftermath of war. Doctrix stated we can not have a narrow-minded view of Roman history as a society because it is not only about war. She asks “What about social history? What about cultural history? Why aren’t we thinking about everyday life in Rome and the lives of women?” History as we understand it is in the image of men. When we learn about history, we move from war to war, and we don’t acknowledge what happened between those wars. Obviously, I had to ask Doctrix my burning question: “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” She responded that she thinks about the Roman Empire very frequently, but not the battle aspect. This is very understandable though because she teaches Latin. Latin was a weapon of the Roman Empire. When Romans conquered an area, they brought Latin, which held power in the government and was a tool of imperialism.
Credit: The Collector
Furthermore, Doctrix helped me understand why the Roman Empire was the historical event that was chosen for this trend. The Roman Empire portrays a stereotypical hyper masculine ideology, and it is ingrained in the way we teach and learn history. “Often as Americans ourselves, we think of ourselves as the ‘inheritors of the Roman Empire.’” A good example of this is the Roman Republic. When the Founding Fathers were trying to construct the United States they used different aspects of the Republic to redefine the new American government. They justified different things such as enslavement by turning to the Romans. We became the “New Romans.” American culture derives from the Roman Empire because people made it that way.
For my last question, I asked Doctrix about her own historical Roman Empires, she told me she thinks of the historical aspect of the Roman Empire, Christopher Coloumbus’ arrival in 1492, the rise of new liberalism in the 1970s, 2020 with the uprising of COVID, and the early 1980s with the rise of AIDS. Historical events that we deem as “important” are often connected to a masculine mindset. This could possibly mean that as students, we are learning history from the perspective of a man, and not fully thinking about the experiences women might have undergone. Our education system is flawed by mainly teaching the male outlook on life in antiquity. The original Roman Empire trend is a great example of this because it only focused on the opinions of men. It is important to understand that there is more to history than just bloodshed, and that other cultural and social experiences should be considered.
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