I’ve had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that’s kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they’re one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn’t be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i’m not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.
Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it’s obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what’s with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can’t be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It’s hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don’t ever think something like “Augustus was a role model” unless you’ve got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.
It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome’s decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I’ve never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear’s thoughts.
They obsess over Rome because Rome was a first major (sorta) European polity. Never mind that Rome was closer to a Mediterranean civilization than a European one or that the Western European parts of Rome were complete backwaters or that the link between Rome and the WestTM is far more tenuous than Romeaboos think (The WestTM is linked more to the Carolingian Empire and the Franks than the Rome and the Romans). But the Carolingian Empire is only around 1500 years old, so when you compare that with the Chinese or the Iranian who have millennia old empires that have long existed before the Franks as a distinct ethnic group even existed, of course there’s going to be much malding and coping that the Chinese/Iranian/Indian had massive empires while the Franks were still living in huts. And while the Romeaboo can handwave Sumeria no longer existing or modern Egyptians having nothing to do with ancient Egyptians, they can’t as easily handwave Iran or India away and they 100% can’t handwave China away.