Straight guys apparently think about ancient Rome a lot

[quote]What would be the homosexual equivalent of that, I wonder.

Ancient Greece.

No one I know?

Rome is fun

r1 If by ancient Greece you mean The Golden Girls.

[quote] What would be the homosexual equivalent of that, I wonder.

Uh…perhaps gay men thinking about the Super Bowl? 🏈🤷🏻‍♂️

Toga parties.

They like movies about gladiators.

[quote]What would be the homosexual equivalent of that, I wonder

Follies

Fun Roman fact for September 18

On this date in the year 96, the Roman Emperor Domitian was assassinated … his very last act in the purple having been to condemn to death an astrologer who predicted Domitian’s murder.

Domitian’s murder was the exact birth date for imperial Rome’s golden age in the judgment of Gibbon, who opined that “if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.”

He tried to defeat the gods by having put to death an astrologer named Ascletarion, having first demanded Ascletarion’s prediction of his own manner of death: “that he would shortly be rent by dogs,” the oracle replied. To prove him wrong, Domitian had him killed some other way and immolated — but his satisfaction drained away when “it chanced that the pyre was overset by a sudden storm and that the dogs mangled the corpse.”

Retiring his bedroom to prepare for an exultant bath, Domitian was there attacked and stabbed to death by a steward named Stephanus, joined by several others — “Clodianus, a subaltern, Maximus, a freedman of Parthenius, Satur, decurion of the chamberlains, and a gladiator from the imperial school.”

Musk weighs in (of course) with a completely incorrect take (also of course).

r9 Gibbon was another one who was full of shit a lot of the time, which that quote where he conflates aristocracy (and Rome) with the whole of humanity perfectly illustrates. Although, unlike Musk, he had the excuse of not having all the information and the latest research at his fingertips.

When Musky whines about "low birth rate," he's referring only to white people isn't he?

I follow a couple of YouTubers who run Roman history channels. It's definitely a thing.

It must be something that manosphere influencers constantly reference - some kind of atavism, a time of real men and glory, something like that.

r12 And military history has always been more interesting to men than to women. Although that might not be inherent – if the great generals throughout history were mostly women, that interest might have been flipped today. It just so happens that we're the inheritors of mostly patriarchal societies. Not even the gays can escape that, as evidenced by the freakout in the thread about the dress code change in the Senate.

I’m not straight, but I think about the Roman Empire a lot. You’d have to be an uneducated clod not to.

In what context? Socio-political parallels, worries about another splitting of the Empire, or sex fantasies?

Betcha it's sex fantasies, featuring themselves as members of the ancient 1%, owning sex slaves and hosting orgies. Little do they know, but if a white middle-class man couldn't pay his debts or his taxes, he could be sold into slavery and end up in Gladiator school or as a rich man's sex slave himself! Well, if he was lucky. He's probably just end up worked to death in a lead mine that had zero safety precautions.

They all want to show how profoundly "cool" and "smart" they are by being able to quote famous Stoic Philosophers like Seneca, etc.

Plus, don't tell me that the fragile het-male psyche doesn't feel better imagining itself in the visage of an Emperor.

I guess thinking of England is passe.

They're repressed closet cases who want to fuck hot gladiators

[quote] don't tell me that the fragile het-male psyche doesn't feel better imagining itself in the visage of an Emperor.

r16 chill

𝑀𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑏𝑒𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚.

[quote]I guess thinking of England is passe.

Thinking of England is for missionary style.

Thinking of Rome is for doggy style.

Lean forward and think of Athens.

I'm glad straight guys think of Rome. All the easier to get them into Togas with no underwear. Then I can fondle their cocknballs all the easier. Win win.

Ancient Rome? You mean, like in 1990?

Well, gay or straight, Mike Duncan's podcast on the history of Rome really was wonderful. Fun for all genders and sexualities!

If men understandably think about Rome a lot, what do women think about?

Let me guess…a new game set in Ancient Rome is about to be released….but it has ancient jets…ancient machine guns…ancient nuclear weapons…..ancient man/beast hybrids…ancient wise men living inside an active volcano …UFOs ….and an asteroid approaching earth that must be stopped by Gaius Julius Caesar and a visitor from the future…..

I scroll through TikTok daily and every day I’ll see a couple videos related to Rome. It could be about Latin, Roman history, archaeology, or architecture. That’s just one source, but there’s a lot of Roman references in our lives.

Without Rome you wouldn't know what month it is.

𝐒𝐞𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫 (from Latin septem, "seven") was originally the seventh of ten months in the oldest known 𝙍𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙧, the calendar of Romulus c. 750 BC.

After the calendar reform that added January and February to the beginning of the year, September became the ninth month but retained its name. It had 29 days until the Julian reform, which added a day. In the 1st century BC, an extra day was added in honor of the deified Julius Caesar on 4 September.

The Roman calendar was some sad shit, at least at first. They had 304 days, and just kind of forgot about winter. Then priests could dick around extending the "year" in office if they liked the guy and shortening it if they didn't.

And of course you're right r28, and I love how the lazy bitches shoved a couple of months in there, but still kept talking about seventh month, eighth month, etc, when that was completely untrue.

Then finally Julius Caesar steals the Egyptian calendar and pretends he invented it. So good at so many things, but just fucking amateurs and morons when it came to figuring out what day it was.

R26 there are a lot of popular video games involving rome but they tend to go for a quite serious and historically accurate tone. Gaming has evolved a lot in the past few days and there is such a thing as a highbrow release.

R30 decades not days, something is wrong with my head today sorry.

More like, they think about movies and tv shows and video games about ancient Rome—and as someone said upthread, manosphere clichés about Rome. I doubt the vast majority know anything about the actual ancient Rome.

R30 is on to something, which one would call the gamification of history. It is ultimately a capitalist approach, as the military expects their new forces to be raised on war being in the sense of point-scoring. Age of Empires, Rome Total War, not to mention the Air Force flying drones like it's Battlefield.

Yeah. What have the Roman's ever done for us?

I posted some great stuff on this thread and it disappeared. I'm not going to even try to reconstruct it. Fuckers.

Have you heard of Darius Arya? What do you think?

Darius Arya is an archaeologist, public historian, author, social media influencer, and TV host based in Rome, Italy. He works around the globe, with a focus on Rome and the Roman Empire. He directs educational programs, leads lecture series and heritage preservation initiatives, specialized tours, and features in or hosts TV shows for US, Italy, and other European programs.

"[R30] is on to something, which one would call the gamification of history."

Oh, it's been happening forever, does anyone remember the Woody Allen fluff piece "Midnight in Paris"? Man who fantasizes about the 1920s meets a 1920s girl who fantasizes about the Belle Epoque?

When most people who are into history think about history, they think about the lives or the Roman Emperors or the Regency nobility, or the flappers of the 1920s or the court of the Plantagenets, they don't think being a peasant wearing thin homespun wool in the dead of winter, or shopkeeper who shits into a chamber pot. And when they imagine themselves back in the Good Old Days, they don't imagine themselves as a Roman soldier who digs ditches for 20 years to serve the Empire, they think of themselves as the Senator who sends them to war and goes home to his house full of slaves.

More ancient tidbits from educated posters, please. I find it very interesting.

[quote]and goes home to his house full of slaves

Sexy slaves who look like Tony Curtis!

AsI understand it, the Roman Empire started with a collection of small disconnected villages or gatherings probably tribal, on the "seven hills" , and either thru agreements, expediency or conflict they eventually became one city. They had thatched roofs and were mud huts. We're talking about maybe 1200 BCE. ish. Rome began to build up and become the city we think of around 700-800 BCE. There's evidence of Greeks, settling in the area around that time too. Also other influences. The peninsula had many tribes and cultures, and the outside world, Greeks and others also had settlements, including from other Mediterranean civilizations. At least that's what I have learned. there are myths and legends about Romulus and Remus raised by a wolf, and about Aeneas who fledTroy and allegedly settled in Troy. But since there are no written records going that far back, the only way they can find anything out is by digging and that is not easy because buildings were built on top of other buildings going back to at least 400 BCE. Personally I don't get why they can't develop more information. Yes digging is difficult, but Cairo and Alexandria are huge cities, and Cairo is older than Rome, and they manage to dig and come up with information. It's also interesting to me that we think of Greece as giving us architecture, and Rome as giving us engineering, but Egypt did it much earlier an gave us both. The columns at Karnak temple in Luxor are obvious forerunners of Greek columns, and they excelled at engineering too. Still it is fascinating to look at how Rome grew from a collection of villages to a vast empire, and how they did it, and what drove them, is endlessly fascinating to me. But I love History with a passion.

I studied Classics so I think about the ancient world a lot. History does repeat itself.

I bought this ebook this summer when it was on sale for $1.24, because I saw an online recommendation for it, but I haven't started reading yet. This past winter I listened to all of the audio book of Mary Beard's SPQR. It would better if she had been the narrator. I also bought her book The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found, audio version, but I haven't started it yet.

Many men have an interest in history. This is dumb. Mocking anyone for having intellectual curiously is anti-intellectual.

Anyone who is interested in Ancient Rome and the Mary Beard book, SPQR, you only need to go to You Tube and watch her episodes. They're pretty good. Those Italians stole everything from the Greeks.

Whenever straight people have discussed Rome with me, they claimed homosexuality was a symptom of that empire’s collapse.

You need to meet new straight people, R45. Also, the Roman Empire collapsed after officially adopting Christianity as state religion in late antiquity; a stronger argument could easily blame that as a larger cause for the empire's demise over homosexuality, which was neither official nor novel at the time of Rome's collapse.

[quote]Also, the Roman Empire collapsed after officially adopting Christianity as state religion in late antiquity

What’s the connection, r46? Thought the official explanation for Rome's collapse was overextension of its administrative borders, plus barbarians at the gates.

I heard Jake Gyllenhaal bites down on a pillow and thinks of Victorian England!

I think about Rome a few times a week; it's such an interesting society to learn about, and the sheer breadth of its history is hard to fathom at times.

I guess that straight men might be less critical and think things like "Oh Rome was so cool, why did it have to fall?" Rather than studying its culture and history. Remnants of Rome lived on for another thousand or so years in the Byzantine Empire (though the Byzantines developed a much different culture), but you see very little interest in that society.

Anyway, I think about FOLLIES, Victorian England, and Romantic poetry far more often than Rome.

[quote] If men understandably think about Rome a lot, what do women think about?

Clothes, hair, make-up, cooking, cheating on their spouse. Stuff like that.

The hidden lede here isn’t than men think about the Roman Empire a lot. It’s that women find that hilarious.

It’s beyond belief that anyone could think about a past civilization that gave us our laws, language, architecture, government, ethics, and religion. Men are so ridiculous! Why aren’t they focused exclusively on potpourri, extensions and the latest romance reality game show?

They want to give license to their inner girly-men. A toga is the closest they can come to actually wearing a dress.

[quote]When Musky whines about "low birth rate," he's referring only to white people isn't he?

Yes R11. He's South African and their racism is deeply and indelibly ingrained. I say this from much experience of having to deal with white South Africans who have fled to new countries and think that all other white people think the same way as they do. It's fucking disgusting.

Romans deserve a lot of credit for creating large domed buildings, an art which eluded the Greeks. The entire Mediterranean is prone to earthquakes, and the Greek temples, which have beautiful proportions all lost their roofs over time, but the Pantheon still exists intact because it was a dome They also successfully built an integrated highway system, and many of their highways exist after 2000 years. Many of the aqueducts they created are still intact and could probably still bring water from mountain streams down to towns at sea level. 21st century engineers and architects are still searching for the secret ingredients in their cement, which far outlasts modern cement mixtures.

It’s Men Gone Wild.

"Thought the official explanation for Rome's collapse was overextension of its administrative borders, plus barbarians at the gates."

I also like the explanation that the tax system wasn't sustainable. After a few centuries of Empire, the rich began to regard themselves as above the law, and they stopped sending their sons for mandatory military service, and they stopped paying taxes. So the tax collectors could only collect taxes from the middle class, as the rich wouldn't pay and the poor had nothing to pay, so the tax collectors literally drove the middle class out of existence, by taking everything they had in an effort to keep the state funded.

Sound familiar???

R53 Americans are just as racist as South Africans.

The Empire was falling apart based on what R56 and R47 have it right. Christianity was viewed as the potential savior of empire, except that that reincarnation didn't happen immediately but over time. The Empire got too damned big, and it split in two. Then came the dark ages. R54 you give them well deserved credit, but for architecture of the domes and for their highways and aqueducts. But they borrowed from the Greeks who borrowed from the Egyptians. The idea of the columned temples, etc. in Greece came from Egypt. YOu will see no domes in Egypt from ancient times. Mosques have domes but that came in 800 AD. Before that Egypt's temples and structures were columned going back 3500 years or more.

R58 here; actually I think the earliest domed mosque I saw in Cairo, was built in about 900 AD.

What I like about Mary Beard, and I share the fascination, is the main questions:Why and how did the Ancient Romans become an Empire? They were still living in mud huts when Egypt was at it's peak of civilization. And BTW Egypt was building irrigation systems 3000-4000 years ago.

Oddly enough I was talking to a colleague about the Obelisk of Theodosius in Istanbul as he’d just gotten back from there, and I had seen it in June (the obelisk was brought to Constantinople by emperor Theodosius I in the 4th century). One of the women in the office overheard and said “see, it is true men think about the Romans every day”.

So there were mud huts in a collection of small clusters among the seven hills around 800-900 BCE, and by 400- BCE they were minting gold coins. Mary Beard delves into when did they become a city? How did the method of governing evolve? Early writers described kings because that was their frame of reference, but in the early days it was chieftains not kings.

[quote] the Roman Empire collapsed after officially adopting Christianity as state religion in late antiquity

Well, maybe eleven hundred or so years after ... unless you're talking about those hillbilly provinces to the west ...

Guys, I only offered the "Christianity destroyed Rome, not homosexuality " comeback as just that: a comeback. A joke. I don't actually believe it.

But I also don't believe that homosexuality killed Rome and I recognize that b.s. for two things: a fallacy as ludicrous as my Christianity-blaming one, and a right-wing, homophobic, and Christian-derived canard pushed by conservative historians and school teachers.

I'm honestly no historian but I am a minor history geek. I believe Rome fell because its leadership/ruling classes became irredeemably corrupt and soft, and because they didn't effectively defend themselves against invasions. They also grew too large to manage and the Tetrarchy inevitably led to fragmentation and internal conflict.

But it's still fun to fuck with homophobes, and I do think about Rome weirdly often!

R63, when people talk about "the fall of Rome" in the context of acceptance of homosexuality, they clearly aren't talking about the Byzantines or the 15th century.

Either way, they are talking pure nonsense r65.

Please, Rome fell officially in 476 AD. It was invaded in 410, by German hoards. So not the Gays. it was the Germans. The Empire was divided in two by then and the Byzantine empire continued until the Fall of Constantinople in the 1400's. AD.

hordes, you mean, not hoards ^^^

German hordes

The empire didn’t collapse or fall apart. It just sort of faded away. German peoples were moving in huge numbers in the 3rd to 5th centuries and they didn’t hate the empire unless the empire made war on them. In fact they wanted to be a part of it.

They were brave and strong so they were indeed let into the empire, its army, and its government. They made good soldiers and citizens, although sometimes with conflicted loyalties. Eventually it was so many of them, the Roman aspect sort of … faded away.

Think of it this way.

You have a delicious food but it tends to go bad quickly. Adding a preservative makes it last longer but dilutes the flavor. The more you add as time goes on, the longer your delicious food lasts, but it’s more and more preservative, until one day, it’s nothing but preservative. That’s what happened to the roman empire in the west. It didn’t collapse or fall. It just sort of petered out.

It survived for many centuries in the East, a fact often neglected in this discussion.

[quote] Rome fell officially in 476 AD

"Officially"? The capital of the whole empire by that time was Constantinople (not Rome), which continued to rule over an empire that didn't dwindle way for more than 1000 years. The western empire devolved into Germanic kingdoms in what had been the provinces of Britain, Gaul, Spain, North Africa, and parts of Italy. 476 just marks the year when the last western emperor was deposed.

Exactly r70, 476 was the deposition of the last emperor in the west, Romulus Augustus, who was a child, and was deposed by the general and potentate from the middle Danube, Odoacer. (It’s not clear what tribe Odoacer was even from, but he may have been an eastern German.)

But by then the emperors were largely powerless and honorific anyway. And the senate of Rome dealt with Odoacer as the new leader, but a king rather than an emperor. So it’s not like the citizens of Rome itself went out the next day with dust brooms and cleaned up the shattered remnants of the empire.

And outside Rome itself, out on the frontiers, it probably was little noticed at all.

The “Fall of Rome” is widely misunderstood.

Real men dream of wearing sandals and leather skirts

[quote] The Empire got too damned big, and it split in two

The significance of that is just by geography the eastern half got possession of the highly profitable trade routes and the taxes they permitted. Gold pays for soldiers and infrastructure not to mention bribes to possible enemies..

Rome just didn't get the same income from Iberian as Constantinople got from Indian and Persian caravans.

Everyone always forgets about me. Bastards!

[quote] Real men dream of wearing sandals and leather skirts

Maybe.

Romans didn’t wear leather skirts though.

I'd love to go see Pompeii. A lot of walking but then you are meandering through an actual ancient Roman city, even though it's a ruin.