Ed’s Note
About two years ago, on social media (so, really a period of time akin to the Pleistocene), a meme was circulating involving women asking their unsuspecting male partners how often they thought about ancient Rome. A lot, it transpired. It started in some Nordic outpost and, as is the way of this sort of thing, rapidly spread to English-speaking parts of the globe, promptly going viral. The men were all likely to fall into deep reveries about things like aqueducts and highways.
Some were more attuned to bloodsport and liked to contemplate the crude violence of gladiatorial combat, or slaves and Christians pitted against lions and bears. The men, who were questioned widely across the world’s interwebs and therefore represented a very accurate rendering of statistical sampling, seemed to cast their minds to the imperium somewhere on a scale of “all the time” to at least once a week. Which tells you something about the enduring appeal of all things Roman and what they have come to represent in the popular-computer-game-playing, Hollywood-blockbuster-watching section of the populace. Plus the readers of Robert Harris and Mary Beard. Not least, I suspect, an opportunity to muse on the rise and fall of that erstwhile empire. So big, so virile, so practically everywhere for so very long and then — the dark ages.
I don’t know whether they ran these assessments of the male psyche in Korea or China, and whether the men there also confessed to pondering the Joseon or Tang dynasty on the hour. And, by extension, do South African men spare a thought for the great Zulu empire thrice a day? These are the questions I have.
But I can see why Rome could be quite a compelling mind worm in this day and age, when the shifting waters of gender identities threaten to suck us all under in competing narratives about what it means to be “a man” or even “a woman”, for that matter. I cannot presume to understand what goes on in the male-oriented cranium. The more I try to fathom it, the more mysterious and opaque it becomes to me. I know we are not meant to put it all down to biology, hormones, and evolution, but by Jove, as the Romans would say, it is hard to ignore this stuff.
I just know how oestrogen plays thick and fast with my own brain patterns, making me broody and happy to play nice when it’s coursing wildly through my system and a clear-eyed bitch taking my pet dog, three-headed Cerberus, down to the pit for a little light sparring when it is not. So I can only imagine the effects of testosterone.
Certainly, the past century has been exceptionally kind to male evolutionary advancement. I don’t mean the supremacy of fine examples of the gender like the Donald, Vladimir, Jinping, Elon, Peter, and Jeff. I mean that men have grown twice as tall and twice as heavy as women on average over the past century. So, as long as the going is good — as it mostly has been for 100 years — the males are just getting bigger, stronger, harder, faster.
In evolutionary terms, this means they really benefit more from abundance than females do. You would think they would do everything in their power to keep the good times rolling. And maybe this is why their thoughts turn to Rome. There are many who delight in the untrammelled “master of the universe” emperor shtick. Who wouldn’t want it all — plus unrivalled access to resources as you grow and grow into your dominance? You can do a lot with all that thrusting, unbounded power. That is, until you find yourself bleeding out on the Senate floor with a bunch of equally ambitious strivers standing around your rapidly expiring body, discussing the best way to remove bloodstains from a marble floor.
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Aspasia
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