If you’re online in any capacity, you’ve probably seen this trend making the rounds. Many women are talking about how fascinated they are that the men in their lives seem to be thinking so much about 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 lives think about the Roman Empire.”
So I asked my husband: “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?”
And without missing a beat he said “Every day.”
YALL! Why!?
— Rev. Kelsey Lewis Vincent (@KelseyMLoo) September 6, 2023
The trend came about when Instagram user @gaiusflavius posted a reel saying “Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire.”
Asking men this question and filming their answers quickly became a trend on TikTok, and…well, here we are!
Now personally, I love ancient Rome, so I loved to see that a lot of people are, apparently, thinking about it:
Another one:
And a lot of the videos are actually super endearing. This one is my favorite — he got me excited to talk about it too!
In many videos and comments, a lot of people are surprised and amused by how often men seem to be thinking about Rome.
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 Post in an article published yesterday. 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.
TikTok / Via tiktok.com
I definitely wasn’t the only one who felt a little left out!
Also: this.
not to be a buzzkill but as a woman in classics, a field full of young women, with older men monopolizing the positions the power, I kinda hate how normal it is to replicate the idea that women have less of a claim to history https://t.co/1HOycEMtPE
— @soygirl.bsky.social (@godprincess_oat) September 15, 2023
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.
Universal History Archive / Getty Images / Bamini / Getty Images/iStockphoto
The funniest answer I got was probably, “Before meeting you? Never. After you? Once a week.” …But then I seriously diversified the people I was asking, LOL.
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?!
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I should also note that this obviously wasn’t a random sampling of the population, although I did my best to get a huge variety of people (and for the record, the only Classics classmate I polled was a man).
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.
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If you’re curious about my math, my p-value was .069, which is less than .05, and thus not statistically significant. But I want to say that if just one woman had changed her mind (I had quite a few who said they thought about ancient Greece a lot), we would have had a p-value of .043, and I would be able to say that women statistically think about ancient Rome significantly more than men do. Oh well!
So, it’s not that men actually think about Rome more — it’s just that the trend is making it seem that way.
Via tiktok.com
If you think about it, only women who aren’t thinking of Rome much are likely to ask men about it and film the answers. And out of those, only the videos where men have funny or interesting answers are likely to actually get posted. I mean, no one’s going to post a guy saying “…Why would I ever think of that?” — and no one, of course, is asking women.
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.
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I’ve seen so many people who are chronically online and LARPing as ancient Rome enjoyers. I think it gives very ordinary men a feeling that they are more “masculine” than they really are. Guys, just go read a book, treat everybody like they are people, and hit the gym. You’ll feel better.
But, people, why in God’s name are we thinking about Rome so much?! I mean, I’d estimate that over half the population is thinking about Rome “fairly often.”
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I know that I’m obsessed with Roman history, and that most people are not, at least to the degree I am. I had to know: What are these people thinking about when it comes to Rome? So, I asked everybody I surveyed.
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.
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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.
Julian Elliott Photography / Getty Images
Blake will kill me for this, but in the interest of journalistic integrity, I’m going to tell you all that I think this Rome interest comes from his playing a lot of nerdy games. When I asked if that was the case, he said “Is this even a poll? Or did you call me just to be mean?” …But then later, he admitted I was right.
Quite a few people said they think often about how Rome impacted European and Middle Eastern history through engineering, religion, and politics.
Jesse Warren / Getty Images
The most insightful answer goes to my dad, who said he gives a lot of thought to the advent of Christianity there and its later effect on Europe, as well as the opulence of Rome, how people lived their daily lives there, and parallels between Rome and the United States, especially when it comes to a culture of conspicuous consumption.
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 considering corruption and other issues in our own government.
Bloomberg Creative / Getty Images/Bloomberg Creative Photos
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.
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