My Daughter Caught Me Thinking About the Roman Empire
A couple of months ago, my daughter asked me a question so out of left field, yet so apropos, I reacted like a person witnessing a magic trick they couldn't explain. “How often,” she asked, “do you think about the Roman Empire?”
When she posed this question, it just so happened that I was working on an essay on the parallels between ancient history and current events. A few minutes before she queried me about the Roman Empire, I’d deleted the following paragraphs from my draft, relegating them, as it were, to the cutting room floor:
[T]wo high points of my ill-fated collegiate career were freshman Western Civilization and English Composition.
After spending the first part of my freshman semester exploring the wonders of non-academic college life, I made an appearance in Western Civ just in time for a midterm exam I hadn’t bothered to study for. Although I was totally unprepared, somehow, I managed to eke out an A minus on the exam.
A few weeks later, I managed to get one of the top marks in my English Comp class for an essay I wrote forecasting that the United States would meet its demise in much the same way as the Roman Empire.
There was no way she could know about my deleted passage referencing my essay on the Roman Empire essay from nearly fifty years ago, so I was stumped. But one look at her face told me I was about to be the butt of a joke.
I was a victim of the latest TikTok trend, one in which women ask their male partners, their fathers, or some other unsuspecting man how frequently they think about the Roman Empire. If TikTok videos are any indication, we men think about ancient Rome quite a bit.
When in Rome…
The male obsession with the Roman Empire should come as no surprise, especially among men of a certain age. After all, we have been inundated with Roman imagery since we were old enough to play hide and seek.
Unlike today's classrooms, where swathes of world history are reduced to a handful of paragraphs, we actually spent time learning about this once-great civilization. As a child, I feasted on Roman myths and legends, like that of Romulus and Remus, the mythical twins raised by wolves credited with founding the city of Rome.
In my adolescent world of three-channel television, I absorbed a steady diet of Roman exploits. Before the evil empire of Star Wars, the Roman Empire was my villain of choice.
In my imagination, I was the Black version of Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus; I play-acted the exploits of pre-NRA Charlton Heston’s Ben Hur. In my backyard playground, I was Spartacus. When I recreated Heston’s famous chariot race in my mind, I was Judah Ben-Hur. Those characters were among my first heroes.
One of my first childhood jobs was helping an uncle who had a janitorial contract. One of his clients was Harry Brace’s Roman Spa. The club was one of Little Rock's first fitness centers. It was also a place where neither I nor my uncle could ever obtain a membership.
Still, I marveled at the replicas of Roman statues surrounding the Parthenon-style building, and the locker rooms decorated in the style of Roman bathhouses. As I emptied that fitness club’s trash, I envisioned myself in Ancient Rome.
I visited a local Starbucks for a rare $5 latte a few days ago. Entering the drive-through, I prepared to order using the company’s Grande, Venti, Trenta lingo, when, out of nowhere, Veni, vidi, vici—a Latin phrase attributed to Julius Caesar by Plutarch—popped into my head.
Damn, I thought. I’m doing it again.
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