Sex on the brain? No, men are most likely thinking about the Romans

How often do men think about the Roman empire? That’s the question currently setting TikTok alight. Taking inspiration from an Instagram reel posted last month by Swedish gamer Arthur Hulu, who styles himself Gaius Flavius, women are uploading videos of themselves asking their partners exactly this – and gobsmacked when the answers come back. Once a day isn’t unusual. Once a week seems a bare minimum. Frequent male thoughts about sex, beer or football, sure: but the Roman empire? Women have no idea.

A quick look at my bookshelves suggests I am ahead of the TikTok curve. There’s Robert Graves’s I, Claudius; all three volumes of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy; The Trigan Empire (Seventies space opera meets ancient Rome); every Asterix book (”The year is 50BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely…”); and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Every drive in Italy proves to me that Ben-Hur is a documentary. One of those drives was a six-hour round trip to Lake Trasimene while on holiday, because I wanted to see where Hannibal’s men had massacred Gaius Flaminius’s army during the Second Punic War in 217BC. No one else was mad enough to submit themselves to a long trip in sledgehammer heat without aircon, so I went alone. That’s the kind of draw the Roman empire has. And even driving here in England provides plenty of reminders: many new builds look like they won’t last a couple of decades, let alone the couple of millennia they could expect with superior Roman concrete.

Look further, and the Roman empire comes to my mind in myriad ways. Every letter in every word of this article comes from the Latin alphabet. More than half of all English words have Latin roots, not to mention the actual Latin phrases we use regularly: ad hoc, ad hominem, ad lib, ad nauseam, bona fide, carpe diem, caveat, consensus, de facto, deus ex machina, mea culpa, per capita, status quo, verbatim, vice versa, et cetera. Our monarch’s profile on coins harks back to the denarius featuring Caesar with a laurel crown, and when I did jury service a few months ago, I duly noted our cases were R – Rex – versus the defendant.

I’ve already formed an opinion on the much-awaited Gladiator sequel coming out next year, thinking what a shame it is that they haven’t gone with Nick Cave’s fantastically bonkers script, which features Maximus being tasked with killing Jesus, cursed to live forever, fighting in war after war through the ages (including the Crusades and Vietnam), and finally ending up working at the Pentagon. I’ve seriously debated with mates how HBO’s Rome (2005-7) helped pave the way for series such as Game of Thrones. The political intrigue, sexual rapacity (female as much as male), and feuding/backstabbing on the grandest scale, Game of Thrones may have been ostensibly based on the Wars of the Roses, but in effect it’s Rome with dragons.

Smaller references abound too. Want more proof of how obsessed we are? It’s no coincidence that a literal Roman, Roman Roy – “Romulus” to his father – wanted to take over that father’s, er, empire in Succession. The simian protagonist of the most recent Planet of the Apes movies is called Caesar. And in her 2010 book Catullus, Cicero, and a Society of Patrons, Sarah Culpepper Stroup has the greatest footnote in academia when she links Catullus with Public Enemy frontman Flavor Flav.

We love making parallels between the decline of the Roman empire and the state of the western world today. They are hard to ignore. Climate change, a disconnect between government and people, vast inequalities (the historian Ramsay MacMullen, asked to sum up the Roman empire in one sentence, replied, “fewer have more”) widespread corruption, a lack of national purpose, and repeated failures to respond to social and economic faultlines. To paraphrase George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” A gradual diminishing, death by a thousand cuts: as TS Eliot said, not with a bang but a whimper.

The Roman use of military force to expand and cement control over its empire is mirrored in what Vladimir Putin is trying to do in Ukraine: Putin, who wants to recast himself as tsar, a word which comes from the Roman imperial title “caesar”, and whose country’s coat of arms boasts a double-headed eagle representing an augmentation of the Roman empire’s single-headed aquila.

open image in gallery

Is this happening now because of how the Roman empire’s hypermasculine tropes chime with contemporary debates about toxic masculinity? How its military emphasis taps into Samuel Johnson’s aphorism about every man thinking meanly of himself for not having been a soldier?

But my most frequent thoughts about the Roman empire, I’ve realised, come in none of these areas. As a QPR fan, I can’t help but mentally conflate my club’s name with “SPQR” (Senatus Populusque Romanus – The Roman Senate and People): initials found on official Roman buildings, documents and currency, and still used in modern Rome’s municipal coat of arms. But SPQR would never, ever, have stood for being fifth last in the championship.