Men Think About Rome Almost Every Day. That’s a Problem. But It Doesn’t Have to Be.
by Robert Clines
Men cannot stop thinking about the Roman Empire. Viral social media posts and news outlets from The Guardian to Italy’s La Repubblica have all suggested that men are obsessed with Rome. Memes abound. Rome apparently crosses the minds of men anywhere from a few times a month to a few times a day! Rome remains a cultural touchstone, and that probably won’t change. Ancient history books remain best sellers; films like Gladiator or Ben-Hur are award-winning classics; Rome and Pompeii, as I saw firsthand this summer, are as crowded as ever.
As a scholar of Italian humanism, I spend a significant amount of time in Rome and I write about men who think about Rome. While I don’t find this phenomenon surprising, I believe it is problematic...and that’s because Rome is often equated with concepts like “Europe,” “Western Civilization,” and “whiteness.” No, the Romans were not white — whiteness as a marker of racial difference didn’t exist in antiquity. Romans weren’t even just from Italy or Europe. There were numerous Roman writers from Africa; the emperor Septimius Severus (145–211) was born in modern-day Libya; and Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a theologian whose works are central to Western Christianity, was from modern-day Algeria. But the Romans have been made white because white people — mostly men — have linked the Roman past to themselves.
Petrarch (1304–1374), whom we often problematically call the “Father of the Renaissance,” wrote letters to ancient figures like Cicero and Homer. After visiting Rome for the first time in 1337, he wrote “who can doubt that Rome will rise up again once she begins to recognize herself?” But what is the “self” Petrarch hoped Rome would recognize? Petrarch was writing after the Crusades and during the rise of the Ottomans and the papacy’s relocation to Avignon, France. This geopolitical reality led Petrarch to believe that Europeans must revive Rome and end the Middle or Dark Ages, which for him meant everything Rome was not and everything we should resist: backwardness, barbarism, unfettered violence, lack of culture.
Petrarch wasn’t alone. Humanists like Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) scoured libraries and monasteries for ancient texts. In his On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, Bracciolini used the ruins of the Roman Forum to wax philosophical on how far European society had fallen. Lorenzo Valla (1406–1457) believed the barbarians who destroyed Rome corrupted the purity of Latin; the result was Italian, which was called volgare. Biondo Flavio (1392–1463) called for restoring the Forum and Colosseum so they could be centerpieces in victory parades against Europe’s Muslim enemies, similar to ancient triumphs. Cyriac of Ancona (1391–1452) wrote about invading the Ottoman Empire to reclaim antiquities from Islam.
This preoccupation with the Romans as the forefathers of Western Civilization continued beyond Italian humanists as Europeans began building global empires. In two important essays in The New Centennial Review and Boundary 2, Sylvia Wynter shows how debates on the humanity of both Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans centered on their perceived distance from Rome. Roman civilization’s purported Europeanness thus became justification for Indigenous genocide, mass African enslavement, and colonialism.
As their empires grew, Europeans constantly invoked Rome to prove white supremacy. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour — an educational journey that terminated in Rome or Naples — became an important way for wealthy Europeans and Americans to see themselves as the heirs of Rome. While in Italy, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68), clearly unaware of ancient polychromy, saw the whiteness of Roman sculpture, including copies of Greek originals, as proof of European racial supremacy. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter argues, “Winckelmann elevated Rome’s white marble copies of Greek statuary into emblems of beauty and created a new white aesthetic.”
Winckelmann’s contemporary, Edward Gibbon (1737–1794), saw Rome as a moral lesson for contemporary Britain. In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon argued that the Roman Empire fell due to a lack of civic virtue and the onset of barbarism, i.e., foreign invasions. His now famous motivation from his memoir for writing captures the essence of white men thinking about Rome: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”
This linkage between Ancient Rome, imperialism, and white supremacy informed the new American Republic and how Europeans ran their empires. The Founders were obsessed with Rome and Greece, often citing ancient authors in their debates of what the United States would look like. This use of classically-inspired architecture, which has a long history, also appeared in Washington, D.C., plantations across the American South, and scores of other structures, linking the United States to Ancient Rome. As Lyra D. Monteiro shows, this neoclassical obsession is grounded in a racially-exclusive vision of the ancient past used to justify American settler colonialism, slavery, and white supremacy. Similarly, in European empires across the globe, perhaps most notably Britain’s, visions of empire and white supremacy have been mediated through antiquity. In French colonial North Africa, agricultural planning was based not on environmental realities, but on French attempts to revive North Africa as Rome’s breadbasket. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy also put antiquity front and center in their supremacist ideologies.
Since Petrarch, the study of Rome has been tied to imperialism and white supremacy. We have to confront this reality and find new ways to show that the study of Rome need not be a project of whiteness or simply a passive exercise in drawing parallels between our world and theirs simply because we see ourselves in the Romans. It’s important to remember, as Keith Hopkins quipped, “Romans were dangerously different.”
But as teacher-scholars of antiquity and its reception, we face an uphill battle on two fronts. First is the belief that studying the past against the grain of whiteness is an attack on Western Civilization, which, as Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us, doesn’t even exist. The School Choice Movement and the Classical Learning Test aim to shield students from a more critical study of the past, opting to celebrate antiquity as the font of Western Civilization. They want us to think more about Rome. I love Rome. Having spent a significant part of my life there, I am immersed in the practice...but how we think about Rome is where the problem lies.
The other battle is the increased neoliberalization of higher education and the shift toward job training and more “relevant” and presentist topics, even within the humanities. At the time of writing, there are only twenty-nine tenure track searches in classics nationwide. Ancient history and premodern history in general — where classical reception emerges — are faring far worse. According to the American Historical Association, only thirty-seven (about 8%) of all full-time history positions in 2022–23, both tenure track and non-tenure track, were in premodern history.
But if people are thinking about Rome every day, then it’s clearly relevant. Therefore, we should invest in research and teaching about Rome, its impact, and its reception in ways that change the narrative about its meaning. To be sure, scholars in ancient studies as well as in premodern critical race studies have been working hard to detach views of Ancient Rome from white supremacy. For example, two recent special volumes of the American Journal of Philology have tackled the legacy of white supremacy in the study of ancient literature. And I think there is an opportunity to capture the attention of students who think about Rome. I mean, who doesn’t want students who think about the topic of their class daily?! Courses on Greece and Rome are very popular, and my Renaissance class usually fills within twenty-four hours. When I take undergraduates to Rome, they are blown away by the heterogeneity of the city’s people, food, art, and history.
Because this pervasive white supremacist image of Rome doesn’t actually reflect any truth about the Roman Empire and its impact on the world, we have a responsibility as scholars and teachers to cultivate a deeper understanding of Rome in all its diversity and richness. It’s a job for all of us — from classicists to modernists and everyone in between — to help students abandon simplistic and often racist views of Rome and instead see its complexities, contradictions, and nuances. And thinking about that Rome every day is never a bad thing.
Robert Clines (he/him) is Associate Professor of History and International Studies at Western Carolina University. He is a literary historian of race, religion, and cross-cultural encounters in premodern Italy. His first book, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean, was published in 2019. He’s received research support from the Bogliasco Foundation, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the US-Italy Fulbright Commission. His most recent essays have explored anti-Blackness and white femininity in Petrarch’s Africa and Orientalism and Roman ruins in fifteenth-century antiquarianism. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Ancient Others: Race, Empire, and the Invention of the Italian Renaissance.
