See the “Roman salute”. Not actually Roman, but instead invented for a film about Romans. Italian fascists liked it and adopted it. Then the Nazis liked it and adopted it from the Italian fascists.

It doesn’t matter that it’s not actually Roman, it’s still something that the fascists can do in order to pretend to be Roman.

You have my xylospongium.

Caesar salad is just another thing that the white man stole from a person of color. Now everyone thinks it was Julius that made the salad instead of some rando from Mexico. What fools we have become.

Salad Man did so much for us 😭

Said the guy pretending all Roman memes are about “poking fun at them” lol

I wish I knew how to do that. I abandoned reddit just so many others as soon as they started their API nonsense, so I’m really just here for the memes. And yes, he would enjoy it greatly.

No. He’s a history nerd regularly posting history nerd shit for our own enjoyment.

No, the other part

What they said.

The deliberate misunderstanding of the Roman Empire necessitates a pre-existing worldview through which to misunderstand it.

What would be the better place to live in human history?

I mean, we can truthfully say it’s damnation by faint praise to say as much, but I struggle to think of a better time.

They were a great people but they were great because their excess was built on the subjugation of nations and enslaving entire people in order to get what they wanted.

Not only on that though, they were great at adopting what was working the best in those subjugated nations, and whatever trade bought to them; not only practical things, but cultural and religious things as well. Just subjugating people doesn’t do much unless you use whatever they have and actually somehow include them in your empire instead - you just can’t hold an empire of that size together by simply trying to genocide all the different people.

Even slavery back then wasn’t necessarily a forever thing, it was more of a circumstance. People regularly freed their well-served slaves, and those freed slaves could attain citizenship and all that. This doesn’t make slavery good mind you, it’s just that it was unlike the slavery in USA which deemed you and your future children all slaves forever, which is the type of slavery people these days think of when talking about the subject.

Now notice how much all this goes against what nazis and magas seem to want; adapting other cultures and their inventions, allowing citizenship to people from different places, freeing slaves and including them too into your nation… These racist, white-supremacist idiots know jackshit about history and understand nothing about why Rome was able to stay in power for so long.

“Waow let’s give more power to fewer people, nothing could possibly go wrong” - Rome nearly every time just before things go horribly wrong

i think you’re right, it was modern fascism (Mussolini), which used Roman imagery in other to return to glory.

I guess by always, I meant a bit less than a century

o7

And we thank you for it.

So can you explain what’s with the anime girl roman memes with all the sexism and racism?

I also don’t get the fetish that the people over in non credible defence have either. War, guns and killing glorified and memed. So bizarre.

Have you not seen the ones with the Roman anime girls? Some really messed up shit. Lots of racism and sexism with a dash of kink.

It is not. I can be interested in history & military history without being alt right.

And as another user said, i doubt the romanmemes or historymemes communities here would tolerate it.

Dumb take.

Fascists also breath air and drink water. Those red flags, too? A lot of people find rome interesting. You can see this across history - look at US government buildings. It’s a roman aesthetic.

Fuck, I guess I’m glad I didn’t follow the history memes to the new instance. I thought all the romaboo stiff was just nerds being silly.

Romans saw sex mainly through a lens of power and domination. They were okay with a man of higher standing penetrating a man of lower social status but if it happened the other way around, the high status man would suffer loss of his masculine honor. With a similar mindset, older men would mentor adolescent men and it was acceptable to engage in sexual acts with them (pederasty).

Can’t speak as to the Kama Sutra, but this is partly correct and partly incorrect. For Romans, sex was definitely seen through a lens of power and domination, but it was never okay for a Roman citizen in good standing to be penetrated by anyone, higher status or lower. In theory, at least; in practice there is considerable deviation from this ‘ideal’. The idea of mentoring adolescent men whilst in a sexual relationship was a Greek practice.

This is not to say that the Romans did not engage in pederasty - unfortunately, they certainly did in some scenarios. But there was no mentor element involved. Even at the height of Roman same-sex practices, the prevailing relationship standards were of a dominant and submissive male (often younger, and either provincial, an infamis, foreign, or enslaved), a ‘in-the-closet’ style affair, or of a husband and a male ‘wife’, which, at least to observers, partly conformed to sexual gender roles even if it (disturbingly, to traditional Romans) preserved the notion of citizenship and masculinity of the ‘wife’.

Notably, the ultraconservative Roman dictator Sulla retired to a nice Mediterranean island with his lifelong boytoy, the actor (actors were considered infames, along with prostitutes and gladiators) Metrobius; the Emperor Titus was noted to have a number of male ‘favorites’ who were actors whose association lasted long enough that he had to give them up when he became Emperor after his father’s ~10 years of rule - suggesting that, at the very least, they were probably not all teens by the time Titus gave up bussy for the dignitas of the Res Publica. Interestingly, the short-lived (and himself somewhat older) Emperor Galba, a bit of a curmudgeon, was noted to have a preference for ‘hard-bodied’ men in early middle-age. The only recorded Roman daddy appreciator.

Some of the material is lost, some is simply unrecorded, and some we have only glimpses into, but on the whole, Roman sexuality is an incredibly multifaceted and alien subject.

Very interesting stuff about the Kama Sutra. I should probably read up on sexuality in pre-modern India sometime, but I have so many goddamn books to read and so little focus to do it with. XD