There has always been a passion for Rome. The Renaissance was inspired by the classics. The French revolutionaries saw themselves reflected in the Roman Empire. Novelists and filmmakers have repeatedly traveled to the times of Julius Caesar or Augustus. The heritage of ancient Rome is still very, very present in the 21st century.
But suddenly that passion for Rome has intensified. It seems that it was the TiKTok social network that lit the spark. It is said that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg joined in immediately and, now, many men, young and old, say they think repeatedly, some daily, others several times a week, about the Roman Empire.
What is true in this fashion? What does it obey? Why is it a male trend? “There is an imaginary around Rome that is still very alive and that may be one of the reasons why this topic has gone viral,” says José Ramón Ubieto.
A clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Ubieto is not too surprised that it is men who think about the Roman Empire, because this phenomenon could be part of the “mourning of masculinity” and the “need to find stories that give shape to a “manliness that no longer matches the old patriarchal idea.”
“Rome would represent for men the nostalgia of better times when the flag of the masculine was raised, when there were gladiators, compared to the current era in which the patriarchy has entered into crisis and there is no longer anything to gladiate,” he adds.
Ubieto also points to a much more prosaic reason that could be behind this viral trend: “A man’s image is more enhanced if he says that he thinks about the Roman Empire, a topic that covers culture, than if, for example, he confesses that “His thoughts focus on sex or football or any other much more banal issue.”
Paco Álvarez, Romanist and author of popular works such as We Are Romans (Edaf), is also not surprised that ancient Rome is in fashion, because “we are still Romans”, but he is surprised that this trend is a men’s thing, because ” “Women had a very important role in Rome.”
“Already before the empire, in the time of the republic, there were women who practiced law, others were doctors and wrote medical treatises, something that did not happen again until the 19th century. Women in Rome were not liberated by any means, but they had more rights than they had in other times; For example, she could inherit or divorce simply by repudiating her husband,” says Álvarez.
And Emilio del Río, doctor in Latin Philology and passionate Roman scholar, is convinced that the fashion of thinking about Rome is not something exclusively masculine, because “without going any further, two of the great experts on the subject are women: Mary Beard, in the United Kingdom, and Andrea Marcolongo, in Italy.”
“Ancient Rome is in fashion perhaps because its knowledge allows us to know our roots, but the truth is that it has always been fashionable because we are Romans: we speak Latin and the classics have shaped our civilization with theater, the novel, poetry “, oratory, democracy, philosophy…” adds Del Río, author of popular books such as Calamares a la Romana (Espasa) and creator of the podcast Locos por losclásicos.
Del Río remembers that “Monty Python already said it in the famous dialogue from The Life of Brian, which asked: what have the Romans done for us? And he responded with great irony that the Romans have done minutiae for us such as sewage, health, teaching, wine, public order, irrigation, roads or public baths.
Things that are in daily life in the 21st century, so “our thoughts are in Rome almost every day, although most of the time we don’t realize it,” says Fernando Lillo, doctor in classical philology and professor of Latin.
Lillo points out that Rome “has provided us with good examples of some of the basic concerns of human beings such as power, war, money, love or health.” And he adds that “there is a lot of Rome in our daily lives, from the language itself, if we speak a Romance language, to the name of our town whose place name possibly comes from Latin.”
But he warns that “the Rome of our thoughts, especially at a popular level, is almost always a reinterpreted Rome.” That ancient empire that so many men claim to think about has often passed through the sieve of Hollywood, Lewis Wallace, Robert Graves, Lindsey Davis, Robert Harris or Colleen McCullough, great authors whose works can be faithful to history. but they have given an epic veneer to a time that perhaps was not as beautiful as they paint it.
“Rome would be a strange place for us to live now for many reasons, for example, because there was slavery. We would not want to relieve ourselves in a shared Roman latrine without the privacy to which we are accustomed and we would be scandalized by the slaughter of thousands of animals in the amphitheater or in the circus that they saw as normal,” Lillo emphasizes.
The current vision of ancient Rome may be idealized and the viral trend of thinking about that bygone era may disappear as suddenly as it arrived, but for writers and filmmakers, and consequently, for viewers and readers, it will always be a matter of interest. and fun as it was for the Renaissance and French revolutionaries.