I’ve had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that’s kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they’re one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn’t be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i’m not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.
Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it’s obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what’s with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can’t be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It’s hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don’t ever think something like “Augustus was a role model” unless you’ve got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.
It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome’s decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I’ve never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear’s thoughts.
‘the’ Romans… but which Romans? it lasted for a long time and incorporated a lot of different tendencies…
it’s the Romans’s world we just live in it, so many things like the calendar, and Christianity via Constantine… it’s hard to know what our world would be without the Romans…
I like those anti-Romans like the Huns and Barbarians, K-dawg does a good treatment of them here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/ch04.htm
these are just random thoughts with no conclusion
i should’ve specified, the middle republic to the division of east and west, then through to the end of the west - but ESPECIALLY in modern times the utter dominance of the late republic and early empire. I am familiar the byzantines got up to some shit, but i’m frankly way less studied there, and they have next to no capture of the western mind the way early imperial rome does