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.
There was also the idealistic liberal view of the Roman Republic and its aristocracy as having a degree of stability and security for the elite that feudalism only guaranteed to a select few of the most special good boys the crown liked the most, and they wanted to create a system that protected themselves from an institutional power above themselves, the public, and each other.