Why We Think about the Romans

It has moved from a meme to a hot topic of conversation in recent weeks: Why do men think regularly about the Roman Empire? Haley has offered her take, Rich chimed in with some recommended reading, and Michael gave his take on The Editors. I think there’s an intersection of four major sets of reasons, all of which are generally true, and some of which are specific to the instincts and interests of men:

1. The impressiveness and the drama of Rome. This, I think, is the most male-specific reason. The Romans were astonishingly accomplished at building and conquering. Living in the world of the ancients, they built structures that endure to this day and were in use for centuries, in part with technological innovations that later generations could not reconstruct. They assembled a colossal empire and connected it by systems of roads and administration. They fought, lost, and won legendary high-stakes battles, most famously against Hannibal. Their gladiatorial games were astonishing spectacles of brutal single combat. Their concepts of virtue and honor were pure red-in-tooth-and-claw masculinity. (Jonah Goldberg’s podcast episode with Bret Devereaux had some great stuff on this topic, and The Editors covered it in a Greeks vs. Romans debate a while back.) The Romans were, for the most part, not good; their society was built on enslavement and conquest, and had many of the other brute vices of the ancient world. But they were great — and living at a vast distance from them and their world, it’s easier to be impressed and fascinated with the greatness and to separate it from the beastliness.
2. The institutional legacy of Rome. The footprint of the Roman empire is still ubiquitous in the West, even 1,600 years after Rome fell. Roman history is central to the history of Christianity; the Gospels tell the story of Jesus living in Roman-occupied Judea. He was executed on the authority of Pilate. The story of Saint Paul’s work in the early church is conducted within Rome and depends in part on his status as a Roman citizen. Saint Peter was executed in Rome, and the Catholic Church’s seat in Rome is a direct legacy of the empire. A passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans, in turn, inspired Martin Luther. Every Christian is raised from an early age in the stories of Rome. Rome is also crucial to the history of Judaism, as the destruction of the Second Temple in a.d. 70 inaugurated the age of diaspora of the Jewish people that lasted until 1947 and continues to characterize much of world’s (and especially America’s) Jewry. The Byzantine Empire, derived from the Eastern Roman Empire, lasted a thousand years after Rome fell, and its history is likewise central to the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. Russia still considers itself, in an important sense, the third Rome. The Holy Roman Empire, forged in direct imitation of Rome and claiming its legitimacy, lasted until 1806 and survived in the institutions of the Habsburg Empire until 1919. The stamp of Latin and of Roman titles and terms is all over the place, from caesar (which in other tongues became “czar” or “kaiser”) to the senate to dictator to impeachment to testimony to the Latin argot of the law. One could argue with some force that the Romans invented the idea of Europe, just as the Greeks invented the idea of the West — and the fact that much of Europe is united within a single political union today is very much a legacy of the Roman idea.
3. The cultural legacy of Rome. Rome has been the setting for novels, plays, films, TV, and poetry for much of Western history, from Julius Caesar to Gladiator to Ben-Hur to Horatius to HBO’s Rome. I grew up playing Conquest of the Empire. There remain lots of ways for young men to be reintroduced to the dramas of Rome. We even use Roman numerals for our Super Bowls.
4. The tragedy of Rome. Few things capture our historical imaginations like missed opportunities and tragic falls. That’s why Gibbon focused on the collapse of Rome. It’s why the Founding Fathers were obsessed with the Roman Republic’s descent into empire. The entire Star Wars saga is built around that same construct — of a republic becoming an empire and losing its soul — precisely because of the power of that dramatic arc and its deep imprint on Western memory. Missed opportunities are the beating heart of military history, and men will debate endlessly the strategic choices that led to the failure of even the most dreadful enterprises, such as Nazi Germany. Why Rome fell is one of the largest, longest, and most hotly disputed of all historical questions, on a par with the causes of the First World War.