It turns out that men often think about Ancient Rome.
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A fun new trend has appeared on the social network TikTok: girls are asking their boyfriends, fathers and brothers how often they think about the Roman Empire. As it turned out, men think about this topic quite often.
It all started with a video of a girl talking about a recent conversation with her friends. In one conversation, someone asked a harmless question: “How often does your boyfriend or man think about the Roman Empire?” The video that started the trend received almost 10,000 likes and quickly spawned many copycat videos. Everyone started asking the men they knew if they thought about ancient civilization. And it turned out that almost every second man does this at least once a week. “All the time,” responded the husband of one of the girls.
The strange question did not confuse the men at all; They responded as if they had been asked how often they brushed their teeth. Thus, the story of Remy Vincent, who thinks about the Roman Empire every day, obtained millions of views on X (formerly Twitter). When asked why Vincent even thinks about the ancient Romans, he replied: “Every time I walk down the road, I think that, in some sense, the Romans “invented” it.” “So I have an internal monologue in my head about what their daily life was like, what the streets were like, the Colosseum, how they dressed.”
EXPERT COMMENTARY
Grigory Pruttskov, professor of the Media Institute of the Higher School of Economics, researcher of the history of foreign journalism:
– Interest in Roman history has remained stable for several centuries, it does not depend on the specific situation in the world. On the one hand, the fascination with the period of the Roman Empire can be justified by the fact that it is even better known than, say, the history of ancient India or ancient China. The first secular books printed in the 16th century were works by Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero. Already in the 17th century, the first French state newspaper, “La Gazette”, describing military operations, cited Caesar’s “Notes on the Gallic War”. Similar quotes can be found in the French press during the Franco-Prussian Wars (1870-71) and the First World War (1914-18). High school students in pre-revolutionary gymnasiums read Roman authors in their original language, and special books with explanations were published for them. On the other hand, we are now largely influenced by the stereotypes spread by social networks, literature, cinema and computer games. Look at the history of Rome: it is largely made up of various wars, uprisings, conspiracies and assassinations. Women think about this much less often.
