If you’re a man who never thinks about the Roman Empire, don’t worry

“What have the Romans ever done for us?” Monty Python memorably asked, and answered, in the 1979 film The Life of Brian. Sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, public health – a hefty list of achievements. Is it any wonder that in the year of our Lord 2023, 1,500 years after the empire fell, our modern-day Caligulas and Claudiuses are still thinking about it round the clock?

According to a #RomanEmpire TikTok trend, which has over a billion views on the social media platform, men think about Julius Caesar and the lads an incredible amount. The trend started in early September, when women started ambushing the men in their lives with their phones and the question, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” Video after video racked up of nonchalant answers, admitting to daily, weekly or monthly reflections on gladiator fights and communal bathing.

It’s only taken weeks for “x is my Roman Empire” to enter the lexicon, with women quickly taking up the challenge of naming the tongue-in-cheek female version. Unsurprisingly, Harry Styles features prominently, as does Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. As soon as I turned my brain to Julius Caesar I found it naturally pivoted instead to Caesar salad, something I think about at least four times a week.

I felt deep kinship with someone who said their Roman Empire was Connell ringing Marianne after the debs in Normal People.

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Speaking of Connell, it didn’t take long for the whole thing to turn meta. Video of Paul Mescal being asked on a red carpet how often the Roman Empire crosses his mind quickly became the thing that lives rent-free in many people’s brains. (With Mescal set to play the lead in the Gladiator sequel he unsurprisingly thinks about it quite often.)

What’s the Irish version of the Roman Empire? If you cut open our brains, what cultural or historical touchpoint are we all constantly revisiting? Italia ‘90 has got to be up there, but is perhaps too obvious. Ditto “we all partied”. Ditto the horrors of the Famine, which a friend and I agreed we both think about regularly. Same with the Easter Rising, Riverdance, the Celtic Tiger, the housing crisis, the Troubles and that photo of Enda Kenny chasing a goose. But what else is lurking beneath the national psyche?

Pat Kenny calling Jerry Seinfeld ‘Jerry SeinFIELD’ on the Toy Show in 2007 is a particularly painful one, along with Nadine Coyle and the excruciating passport interrogation by a stern-faced Linda Martin in 2001

Petrol stations, I’d wager. Our motorway services are gone very fancy and really jazz up a long journey, while nearly every local filling station has a slushie machine and an imposing mountain of protein bars. That sign near Dingle that urges you to “hold a baby lamb”? Never far from my thoughts anyway. Pat Kenny calling Jerry Seinfeld “Jerry SeinFIELD” on the Toy Show in 2007 is a particularly painful one, along with Nadine Coyle and the excruciating passport interrogation by a stern-faced Linda Martin in 2001. What about the exact process of building wattle and daub houses, and those little Viking bone combs they found so many of in Dublin?

All this is not to say that Irish men are not also thinking about the Roman Empire constantly, by the way. A quick search of Irish TikTok users threw up multiple dads (including one not even pausing his forkfuls of piping hot dinner) claiming it’s never far from their minds. “All the time”, “maybe once a week”, “once every two days”, “10 times a week” were just some of their instantaneous responses. Which is interesting given that it’s said that the Roman Empire never made it as far as Ireland. Seems like their time might be better spent mulling over, say, what happened to that Mary Robinson tapestry that used to be on display in a shop window on Dame Street. Or why nobody uses their indicators on roundabouts any more.

[ How often do you think of the Roman Empire? Quite a lot if you are Mary Beard ]

Of course, not all men think about the Roman Empire regularly, and of course there were videos of men saying they never ponder it at all. The phenomenon was enough to spark expert discourse, though. According to Roman expert Dr Mary Beard, the time period is in the distant enough past that men feel safe in exploring the macho stereotypes that dominate general knowledge about the empire. Idealising the Romans’ accomplishments is probably a decent way to spend a spot of daydreaming, especially in a world where pop culture and Hollywood glamorises and simplifies the reality and scale. And look, if you’re a man who never thinks about the Roman Empire at all, don’t worry about it. It leaves you wide open to ponder the gender pay gap and how to solve it.