I ’m truly fascinated by this .
If you’re online in any capacity, you’ve probably seen thistrendmaking the rounds. Many women are talking about how fascinated they are that the men in their lives seem to be thinkingso muchabout the Roman Empire.
I saw an IG Reel that said something along the lines of “ women have no idea how often the men in their life mean about the Roman Empire . ”So I asked my husband : “ How often do you suppose about the Roman Empire?”And without missing a beat he said “ Every day . ”YALL ! Why ! ?
The trend came about when Instagram user@gaiusflaviusposted areelsaying “Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire.”
Asking men this question and take their result apace became a trend on TikTok , and … well , here we are !
The trend also spawned a ton of memes:
- Youth subgenus Pastor part * I know one man who thought about the Roman Empire every day
maybe if you did your lessons as much as you remember about the papist conglomerate you ’d be smooth by now
how often does the papist imperium think of me 😔
Now personally, Iloveancient Rome, so I loved to see that a lot of people are, apparently, thinking about it:
the roman imperium is in reality fascinating
Another one:
What does this mean … . Also why is he standing like robert pattinson🧍 ♂ ️
And a lot of the videos are actually super endearing. This one is my favorite — he got me excited to talk about it too!
Genuine excitement that i get it up . When he recrudesce into Latin 😂 #fyp#romanempire#latin#spqr@Quinn Moran
And they’re not the only ones. “Why does there seem to be a gender divide in who is daydreaming about ancient Rome today?“asked the Washington Postin an article published Thursday. But the answer is that actually…there is no gender divide.
As a classics major and a huge lover of Roman history, this trend left a little bit of a weird taste in my mouth. I saw no reason why women wouldn’t also be thinking about ancient Rome — I literally think about it every single day.
Also: this.
not to be a buzzkill but as a woman in classics , a playing field full of young women , with old men monopolizing the positions the power , I rather hate how normal it is to double the idea that women have less of a claim to historyhttps://t.co/1HOycEMtPE
So…I decided to call, like, every single person I could think of (plus a few more) and ask them how often they think about ancient Rome.
I asked 50 men and 50 women, and honestly expected things to be pretty evenly split — maybe with men thinking about Rome a liiiiitle more often. But my results surprised me: Only 48% of the men I asked said they think about Rome often, as opposed to 66% of the women. Who knew?!
That might seem like a huge gap, so just to be safe (and because I’m super nerdy) I broke out my high school statistics knowledge and conducted a chi-square test of independence to see if this difference in percentage really mattered. Men, you’re off the hook: According to my little study, there’s no statistically significant difference between how much more often women are thinking of ancient Rome than you.
So, it’s not that men actually think about Romemore —it’s just that the trend is making it seem that way.
I will be interview everyone at youth group tonight for SURE#guys#rome#greenscreen
Also — since this is the internet — I do want to say that there is a world of difference between earnest interest and love of history and, well, weirdo behavior.
But, people, why in God’s namearewe thinking about Rome so much?! I mean, I’d estimate that over half the population is thinking about Rome “fairly often.”
A large amount (and variety) of people gave answers like “I just wonder about what the hygiene was like,” as well as “I just think gladiators are f—cking dope.” Others stated interest in Roman engineering, building practices, and aqueducts. Seriously, I got sooo many aqueduct answers. And TBH, yeah, aqueducts deserve it. They’re the coolest.
My friend Blake (who thinks about Rome once a day) told me, “I’m never like ‘aw hell yeah, time to think about Rome! But it’s tangentially related to enough stuff I like that I think about it pretty often.'” He told me he thinks about military strategy, Roman infrastructure, and mythology.
Quite a few people said they think often about how Rome impacted European and Middle Eastern history through engineering, religion, and politics.
He and a handful of others (one of these being my lovely mom) also drew a parallel to the political structure of the United States and its current state of affairs. With the US government having been modeled after the Roman Republic, it’s easy to think about the late Republic when one is consideringcorruptionand other issues in our own government.
Still MORE people said they enjoy listening to history podcasts and learning about the past in general. One woman (who said she thinks about Rome probably twice a week) told me that for her, it’s all about contextualizing history, seeing how cultures influence each other, and considering what values and powers-that-be still affect our daily lives today.
Whether it’s art, personal growth, engineering, religion, politics, or something else, I think we can conclude that everybody, regardless of gender, probably just thinks about history a lot. And isn’t that lovely?
