Imperium Romanum: History, the Sexes, and the Self

The glory days of Rome are still visible to us in the magnificent ruins left behind. “Roman Capriccio: The Colosseum and Other Monuments,” 1735, by Giovanni Paolo Panini. (Public domain)

Sometimes a random comment enters the brain, and the mind suddenly becomes a playground, with thoughts dashing about like a 5-year-old racing from the swings to the slides to the sandbox and back again.

This recently happened to me after a friend mentioned the current popularity of memes about Ancient Rome. Several of these were amusing. My favorite was of a schoolboy seated in a classroom with the visage of Julius Caesar plastered over his face. The first panel shows the boy studying a notebook; in the second, hidden behind the notebook, we find a map of ancient Gaul and Britain. The caption reads, “When the teacher thinks you’re studying but you’re actually planning to invade Britain.” Here the male students in the history classes I once taught popped to mind.

But what really revved up my imagination—think of that kid again, cut loose on the playground—was Tyler O’Neil’s article, “Of course, I think about the Roman Empire Daily. You Don’t?” Mr. O’Neil described another new trend on social media in which “wives were surprised to hear their husbands say they think about the Roman Empire every day or a number of times a week,” and he provided some good answers as to why Rome continues to entrance us today. If you want some laughs, don’t miss the short video that accompanies the essay. Better yet, ask the men in your life whether they ever think of the Roman Empire.

It was Mr. O’Neil’s piece and the video that sent my thoughts careening around like racked balls on a pool table after a solid break.

Back to the Past

It isn’t uncommon to wish ourselves back into the past. One friend has mentioned several times that she has fantasies about living in the 19th century, when manners and decorum mattered more than now, and a college teacher once told me that he often sank into the 18th century whenever he returned to his bachelor’s quarters. Another woman I know discovered that her husband thinks of returning to the Rome of 44 B.C. and rescuing Caesar from his assassins.

In my own case, if someone asked me “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” I would say several times per week but always in conjunction with thoughts about our own imperium Americanum. Our politicians in Washington appear historically illiterate by failing to make this comparison, ignoring lessons taught by the fall of Rome, such as opening our borders and so undermining the concept of American citizenship, burdening our nation with monstrous debt, devaluing the currency, and by their policies helping to destroy public morality. The Romans did all these things, and the empire eventually crumbled.

At any rate, these daydreamers of the past strike me as a plus. In our present age, when Clio, the Muse of History, lies strapped to a gurney, these folks are offering life support.

Men and Women

Ours is an age that wants everything explained—it’s a major reason behind our culture’s wholesale abandonment of a deity. Anything that can’t be dissected in some laboratory of postmodernism is suspect. In short, we seek to banish mystery, including the mysteries of the opposite sex.

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That so many men ponder the Roman Empire and that so many women are astounded by these musings is but a trivial example of the conundrum that exists between Mars and Venus. As my mind played with ideas, I realized, as I have before, that the riddles in the female are part of their allure and appeal. No matter how much we men may think we apprehend them, for the most part, females remain puzzles missing a piece or two, and the same surely holds true for their take on men. Although sometimes unpleasant, our differences add salt and pepper to our relationships and make a tangy dish of life.

Most of the time, the male and female natures are complementary. They fit together, this time as a puzzle completed. We need each other, not only to propagate the race but to become more fully human. Mulling over these matters, at one point my mind returned to Ancient Rome, this time to the orator and philosopher Cicero, who once wrote, “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” Hmmm. So was it a room filled with books rather than Eve that Adam was missing in the Garden of Eden?

I don’t think so.

History and the Self

“I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

Ah, good old Henry Ford. That sentiment, which he spent the rest of his days trying to explain, is very much alive in our present age of historical illiteracy. The self-proclaimed communists among us, for example, appear to have no clue that since 1920, their Marxist predecessors murdered 100 million people. During the days I spent on my cerebral playground, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the Canadian parliament cheered for a 90-something Ukrainian when it was announced that he had fought the Russians in World War II, oblivious to the fact that fighting the Russians meant he had served with the Nazis. And as mentioned earlier, our own Congress and current administration seem oblivious to historical patterns.

As I romped with these ideas on the playground, it occurred to me that this ignorance and outright rejection of history is, in a very real sense, an ignorance and rejection of the self. We didn’t just appear on planet Earth, alien creatures utterly devoid of a past. Instead, we are the flesh-and-blood embodiments of history itself. In his opening to “Look Homeward, Angel,” novelist Thomas Wolfe gives this poetic yet accurate explanation of our lineage:

“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete 4,000 years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. ... Our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of 40,000 years.”

You and I are not only the genetic repository of all those who preceded us; we’re the inheritors of a culture produced over millennia. The Romans are only a part of this heritage. To throw away the past as “bunk” is to throw yourself on the same pile of trash.

Wrapping Up

“All roads lead to Rome” was true in its day. In my case, however, all roads led from Rome to America.

After playing around with these ideas, let me conclude by applauding the men who are thinking of the ancient world. However offhandedly, they recognize the importance of history.

The time I spent in the imagination also reminded me that to cast off the past à la Henry Ford is to abandon our very selves in the bargain.

And finally, my romp in the park gave me the chance to smile yet again with gratitude and appreciation for the sweet gulf between men and women. As the Romans might say, Natura nihil frustra facit: “Nature does nothing in vain.”