what we talk about when we talk about thinking about Rome
An interview with Rhiannon Garth Jones
You know that meme from a few years ago about how guys think about the Roman empire every day? Perfectly parodied by SNL? I still get asked about it all the time. In emails, in DMs, through the contact form of my website, in notes slid into my locker that say “Will you answer some questions about why people are so obsessed with ancient Rome? Circle one: Yes/No/Maybe.”
Which is why I’m SO grateful to Rhiannon Garth Jones for addressing this question in her new book, All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily. Rhiannon goes through the long history of empires identifying as, with, or in conversation with Rome to show all the ways that Rome has become a shorthand for power. She’s also done me personally a huge service, because I can answer all of those messages in my locker by pointing people to her work.
Rhiannon was kind enough to talk with me over Zoom about her wonderful book. The conversation was so rich that I’m actually dividing it into two sections. I’ll publish another, shorter one about the process of writing this kind of public-facing academic book in a future newsletter.
Rhiannon Garth Jones is a medieval historian who works with material culture and textual sources to think about how people used the past to define their own identity and project power. Her PhD explored the Abbasid caliphs’ relationship with Rome through their art, architecture, and cities during the so-called “Golden Age” of Islam, offering new insights into this pivotal period. Her book, All Roads Lead To Rome, explores the way ancient Rome has been used by cultures, empires, and religions in ways that still impact the world today.
One of the parts of your book that I found the most fascinating was the idea that there hasn’t really been a sort of uncontested site of primary Roman-ness – I don’t want to use the word ‘romanitas’, which you use rarely in the book, because I think it means something in the context of ancient Rome and then it doesn’t get used a lot later on. So I’m going to use “Roman-ness.” Anyway, what does Roman-ness even mean, beyond sort of a vague continuity of power and authority?
I mean, honestly, I think you captured it quite well in the question. What does it mean except for this proxy for power and authority? I think you can identify a lot of the key things that it means at certain points in time, and to certain people and perspectives. But this is kind of my point. There is no one unifying thing that you can pin down, and if you think there is, that’s because you have a very specific framework that just doesn’t really map onto all the evidence. It isn’t the city of Rome.
Exactly. From a very early time.
If your particular thing is, “oh, I’m only into the Republican period, the bit where there’s something I can call democracy.” I have questions, but fine. Sure, then the city of Rome defines Rome. But then even with what we know of the history of Rome from 753 — if that’s really it — until about 27… that changes enormously, their idea of themselves, their function of government. The major and minor gods. And realistically, nobody is really talking about that bit. What they want is the idea of republicanism and democracy married to the high imperial stretch of power and military success. And that’s… a 100-year period, maybe?
And not the same period, right? That’s part of what it seems to mean to be Rome in people’s minds. It’s both the Republic and the imperial period at the same time. Senators in togas arguing, the Cicero period, and simultaneously the imperial period. People seem to think of both these things as though they were contemporary when they think about what it means to be Rome. Simultaneously Cicero and Marcus Aurelius.
Right. And if what you mean is they’ve actually got a massive empire, then fine, because in the Republic, certainly, they are running an empire. They might be doing it without an emperor, but that’s not actually a necessary criteria.
Right. I mean, just look at America.
If you want, like the British Empire, to be really honest about it and say, oh, I’m just interested in the period where Rome has loads of power, well, that actually doesn’t narrow it down. And if what you’re interested in is just the biggest and most badass empire, it’s still not Rome. Rome would arguably not be top 3. Go and find something else.
Yes, and then you could say, well, why not Genghis Khan? If it’s just based on number of people, we’d have to be talking about India, right?
A lot of Chinese history is just going to blow everybody else out of the water. I don't think we should be ranking empires on the size, just to be clear.
But definitely there is an element where Rome is the biggest empire that is “white,” which you did a really amazing job of addressing. Toward the end of the book, you had this bit where you were talking about how the Romans would have been quite offended to be called white, actually, because it would imply that they were effeminate and weak.
Can we take a moment there to just interrogate the assumptions and the implications? Which are not great. They weren’t white, and their buildings weren't white. This is a joke I made really early on when I was writing the proposal. I just texted my friends some snarky jokes, and I was just like, “the US is similar to Rome in a lot of ways. None of those are good, and none of those are the ones that they think are relevant. Yay for roads, yay for massive military violence, yay for enslavement and conquest!”
Being built on slavery. Exactly. It does mean, though, that the idea of what is Rome is so vague that it can be hard to pin down. There’s a book called Why America Is Not a New Rome. But I find the very concept of assessing whether someone is or is not like Rome to be a bit empty and pointless, right? Anybody is Rome, insofar as they want to make that claim. It just seems so beyond the point when looking at your book and the multitude of ways in which people have self-identified in conversation with Rome.
I don’t think it does anyone any good, really, to try to find the best claim. I think what’s useful is to say, one, why does this matter? What are the stakes of this claim being successful? And two, who isn’t being recognized at all? Why? I’m not really interested in litigating whose claim to Rome is better, although I do think it’s very funny that is a thing that has come up periodically throughout history. And people’s answers are really interesting.
There’s a moment in the book where Suleyman the Magnificent, the Ottoman sultan who is also ruling Constantinople, claims the title Kayser-i-Rum, Caesar in Rome. One of many titles, not his most important, but he claims it because he thinks ruling Constantinople gives him the right. And so he’s really annoyed at Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, for having staged a triumph with the Pope. So Suleyman does this whole absolutely ludicrously over the top, unbelievably extra series of triumphs to make the claim for himself. And as part of this, he gets the French, who are Ottoman allies against the Holy Roman Empire, to run around town telling everyone how much better the Ottomans are.
That’s such an amazing moment, where Suleyman decides that it’s worth it to just spend a fantastical sum of money. You’ve got to imagine we’re talking about on the order of billions of dollars in today’s money, right?
Properly ludicrous. There was a lot of research in this book that I would describe as not pleasant. A lot of moments that were really very difficult to read and think about, write about, tie in. And there were some that were just, like… this is excellent. This is just so absurdly fun. This huge, incredibly expensive, carefully choreographed, stage-managed performance of Roman-ness. And then everybody back at home gets kind of sick of this, so I’m just gonna melt down all this stuff.
I mean, that’s the thing about metal, right? You can reshape it to emphasize different parts of your identity.
What I think is incredibly interesting is this overt display of “Roman-ness” from Suleyman the Magnificent is just not that important in the grand scheme of his context, his empire. It’s a thing he puts enormous amounts of money and effort into doing, briefly. And then he moves on to more meaningful things.
To what degree is it always a sort of performance with conspicuous consumption built in? Look at Russia building the Kremlin. How much is being Rome, or being Roman, just about spending a ton of money to look a certain way?
I think it’s not even necessarily always the money, although it does usually cost a lot. I think this is a really key thing from my dissertation research, which is about how the Abbasid Caliphate engages with ideas about Rome, and very specifically see Constantinople as Roman. I can’t stress that enough. Whatever your position on how Constantinople should be interpreted, the Abbasids very much see them as Roman. They see Rome as an example of how to rule, of how to show that you are powerful. For them, they see Rome and Persia as the reference points for how to be an empire. And so they can take those and translate them into their own concepts, do them their own way, and make clear references. They’re not identifying as Roman, but they’re identifying as an empire. They’re identifying as powerful rulers. And for them, that reference doesn't have the baggage that we attach to it.
That must be it, right? Rome is not just about power, although it is about power. It is about a way of showing that you are powerful.
It’s such a recognized way to show that you are powerful, that it’s a perfect shorthand or starting point. I think Rome has been quite consistently this kind of shorthand for how to show that you are powerful. And in part because people keep doing it, so it just keeps being a reference point. It’s not that it’s necessarily the best reference point, it’s just that if people keep doing it, it will keep being a reference point.
It does seem that there’s a gendered element, right? It’s men who are thinking about the Roman Empire every day, according to the meme. Women are thinking about astrology or whatever. But one thing I found quite interesting in your book was that there are a number of times where the sort of cultural element of continuity of Roman-ness is transmitted through a woman. Both with Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, there’s a plan of, “I’m going to marry this indisputably Roman princess, or queen, and that’s how I'm going to solidify my claim.” So I do wonder how that plays into this gendered element, where men are always the ones who are trying to claim Roman-ness for themselves, and women are just the passive cultural carriers.
First of all, I’ve got to say — because if my mum reads this and I don't, she'll be very mad at me — my mum called me quite early on, and she said, “Darling, I just want you to know, I spoke to your dad earlier, and he does not think about the Roman Empire every day. He doesn’t even think about the Roman Empire every week.” I was like, “I’m not surprised, Mum. You know, I’ve met Dad. It's not really his thing.” And she was like, “I just need you to know that I do think about the Roman Empire every day.”
Okay, that is very funny.
And so I was like, “Actually, Mum, you know, I can’t stress this enough, I think maybe you should get some other hobbies. Think about something else.” But she was also delighted when she read the book about exactly this topic you mentioned. She was like, “oh, but there are so many more women than I expected!”
It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I think this goes back to the question of who we recognize and why. In a very practical sense, a lot of these women come from what gets called Byzantium. So they’re not recognized as Roman now by some in a way that really matters. And two, I think there is still an incredibly gendered framework for thinking about this stuff, that if you conquer something, great. If you marry into it, or if you diplomatically acquire it, it’s just… not as interesting, it’s not as significant, it’s not as important. And so the fact that people are more willing to take the early Ottoman claim seriously, because at least they conquer Constantinople. More than early imperial Russia. Because they’re just marrying these Byzantine princesses. As though that’s not hugely relevant.
And not the most European way of solidifying power and positioning yourself.
Right.
I do wonder if a Western European-American model of Roman-ness rejects a little bit both Russia and Byzantium because they had such robust traditions of female rulership. It can’t be a new Rome if women were in charge a lot of the time.
I don’t think it's the only reason, but I definitely think it’s a factor. Or it’s actively a way to orientalize them, or it’s just a consequence of a kind of an Orientalist framework. And again, in both cases, that’s really fascinating, because the idea that Rome is in some way Western, I find very interesting. Like, would you care to look at a map?
And also, it’s the wrong kind of Christianity. Although the “correct” kind of Christianity will definitely change over the years. But the wrong way of doing it is definitely Byzantium. Which I refer to as Romanland.
I loved that.
That’s what they called themselves. Byzantium is just not a relevant name for them. When we’re talking about whose claim gets acknowledged and whose doesn’t… Romanland’s way of maintaining its power, its tax base, its influence, its territorial integrity, for lack of a better phrase, is marriage. It’s diplomacy. And for that, they are consistently dismissed as “in decline,” or kind of weak and fragile. It’s still lasting for a thousand years. You cannot possibly apply the label decline or fragile to that. That’s a very long time.
And it’s tremendously wealthy.
But we just don’t really like the way that they do things, right? It just doesn’t seem as cool and impressive. I’m a real enthusiastic killjoy. That’s meant to be complimentary, I hope.
For a long time, I’ve really enjoyed telling people, “You know, when Constantinople falls, it falls to European, Catholic invaders. It’s not a Muslim, or a Turkish or an Ottoman invading force. They aren't the first ones to conquer Constantinople.”
The Russian example is so interesting. Especially the way that Russia now talks about Byzantium in sort of the same way that Russia under Catherine the Great talked about Rome. It really shows the ways in which these histories sort of rhyme, or I guess slant rhyme each other. And then in Germany also, the way that there’s Roman-German-ness, and then anti-Roman German-ness with the Holy Roman Empire, and then Martin Luther, and then with the Kaisers you have sort of a way to fuse both the Roman-German-ness and the anti-Roman German-ness. One thing about this history of being Rome is that people are really, really good at having their cake and eating it, too.
Because there’s so much cake there to be had, right? When you are talking about an entity in some way or another that survived for more than 2,000 years, there’s just a whole lot of options at that cake buffet for you to go and grab.
Exactly. There’s just so much cake! You can eat the cake, and there’s still plenty of cake left.
I joke a lot with people, I really do think that we should consider Rome to be slightly less important. I think we should all just be interested in some other things. I think we should diversify our hobbies a bit. And I realized that writing a book about Rome and why it’s historically been important is not the most obvious way to do that.
But I think it’s really fascinating to think about even when you’re trying to escape Roman-ness as an identity. It’s very difficult to not frame your next option, consciously or unconsciously, without it. The Germans are like, oh, we want to be less Roman. So, we’ll find a Roman historian describing a Roman enemy and identify with them. I’m not saying it's an illogical step for the German-speaking people to identify with Germania, but the way that they just cannot escape the Roman framework, I think, is so interesting.
And then the way that Russia now is kind of all in on Byzantium, and that’s the word they use. They’re responding to other people’s seizing of that Roman identity. Can you imagine sitting down with Aleksandr Dugin and Putin and asking, “So you’re just really accepting the USA’s terms of debate here? Can you just tell me why? I’m fascinated!” But you just can't really escape it. It’s not quite that Rome can be what you make it, but there’s a lot of ways to find Rome in what you want.
From a craft perspective, you made a number of choices that I really loved. One of them was the little epigraphs that you have, where you’re describing a historical scene in these extremely decontextualized and vague terms, so I have no idea what I’m reading about. As I read it, it becomes clear, but when I first start reading, it’s like, are you talking about present-day America? Are you talking about ancient Rome, are you talking about the Holy Roman Empire? And it takes a little bit for the fuzziness of the picture to resolve.
Talking about it from a craft point of view is actually a really interesting way to think about it. There’s one big thing and one small thing, and I’m pretty sure the small thing came first. Which is to sit down and be like, okay, I have to both keep in mind a reasonable, established narrative. Think about how that emerged. Contradict it where necessary. The point of this is not just to be a killjoy, as fun as that sometimes is.
I really like the idea of an enthusiastic killjoy. You said that earlier, and I’m going to steal that, if that’s okay with you, and just use it in my life. It really encapsulates my ethos. I’m going to kill your joy on this specific thing, but there’s so much more joy to be had. Like cake.
Oh, definitely! I'm very rarely deliberately trying to kill your joy fully, I’m just really enthusiastically trying to tell you something that's relevant and interesting that I know in, like, an incredibly autistic way. It’s really remarkable that I wasn’t diagnosed until quite late.
Oh, same. Cheers.
But basically, I both have to engage with the narratives that people have, because it’s very understandable and reasonable that they have them, while also kind of trying to challenge them, without ever getting away from the point. So I just thought, I’ll write a version I hate and see if that clarifies my thought process and where I want to go. And I did a couple of them, and I thought, I wonder if I can play around with this. It bugged me for a while, they’re not all exactly the same format. Some of them are actual just translations of text, some of them are more of a vague description. But I just really wanted to get people thinking about their preconceived notions. Not in an accusatory way. But make it quite an active process for the reader, rather than just being told they were wrong. There’s a difference between an enthusiastic killjoy and a scold.
I do have to ask you about tech bros. Early on in the book, you mention tech bros talking about Stoics, a topic I get asked about a lot. But you don’t really get to it in the book. You talk about American founding fathers modeling on the Roman Empire, but now American corporations are sort of empires in their own right, and they definitely seem to think of themselves as new Romes. So, I want to hear you talk a little bit about that, so that I can answer some of the press requests in my inbox.
I really strongly feel like if anybody asks me this question, I’d be like, you should go talk to Donna Zuckerberg. So that’s funny.
Oh man. We should just volley them back and forth. You tell them, “Go read Donna,” and I’ll tell them, “Go read Rhiannon.”
We could set up an email template, so it doesn’t even take up a lot of our time. Just copy and paste it and just keep sending them.
So, this was one of the things that I originally wanted to do a little bit more on, and then I felt it was a bit outside the scope of where I ended up. So I considered taking it out of the introduction, and only sticking to references that then appear. There’s a couple of others as well. I didn’t talk about the Catholic Church either, really, not in a meaningful way. But I felt like, actually, it’s quite good to remind people that there’s still just loads of stuff that’s outside even the ludicrously broad scope of this.
But this goes back to a little bit what we were saying about the Germans, right? If you want to see yourself as uniquely powerful… perhaps not uniquely, actually, but, like specifically, particularly powerful, then Rome is a very obvious reference point. It would be a little bit unusual if Rome wasn’t part of the conversation, just as a consequence of all of these endless repetitions of making it important. Especially in an American context, because of the very specific way that the Founding Fathers use Rome in their articulation of a new American identity. I’ve got to say, I live in Denmark, I’ve worked on a Danish startup, it is not my experience that Danish tech bros care very much about the Roman Empire. So I think the US context is a very important reference point for that.
And then… I would be really interested in your thoughts on this, actually, but I think there’s a layer of this very particular post-Enlightenment “Western” ideal of rationalism. And, frankly, a very particularly misogynistic ideal of a lack of emotions being a good thing that ties in pretty easily with a lot of late Roman Stoicism. I do think you could present Roman Stoicism to tech bros entirely devoid of the Roman context, and I think they would find that very appealing. And then it kind of becomes a gateway back in.
I do think there’s an element where the content itself is appealing, and then you get to sort of cosplay Gladiator. So, wins all around.
There’s an extra layer of this that I don’t really go into in the book, but yeah, the fact that you get to present yourself as both profoundly intellectual and seriously addressing the issues of the day, like a Roman senator — as though, you know, they weren’t all constantly really dramatic and making terrible decisions, and really selfish and self-absorbed or short-sighted, or whatever. But on the one hand, you get to kind of present yourself as a serious statesman, and on the other hand you can run around cosplaying Gladiator. You get to be both really serious and important and also dress up as a military hero.
I did wonder, as you were describing it, a thing which I always think about, which is: how much can we blame Cicero for this?
Oh, I think we should blame Cicero for so much. A lot, really a lot.
Thank you! Yes, that’s sort of my Roman Empire: I think every day about how we could blame Cicero for things. But I do think there’s an element that gets really picked up by the tech bros that we can blame Cicero for directly, which is the idea that Rome is a meritocracy.
Yes! Oh, yes.
That is something that Cicero really, really is obsessed with. The idea that in Rome, whoever’s the best man for the job is going to rise to the surface. His whole narrative is, “I was the best man for the job, and I was a novus homo,” and all of that.
Right. His whole self-composed narrative. Cicero’s version of his life story is that he dragged himself up by his bootstraps with his own personal brilliance.
Definitely. There was no family wealth or anything. He definitely wasn’t already a part of the senatorial class.
The fact that he could afford to train with all those amazing rhetoricians to learn how to do it, just completely by the by. They picked him up off the street.
A bit of a “Kylie Jenner is a self-made billionaire” kind of narrative. I do think that the tech bro obsession with Rome has to do with this, because the idea of meritocracy is very much a part of Silicon Valley’s self-identification, that the people who are the best and the smartest will be the ones who are in charge and are the most successful. Which I actually don’t think is as much a part of the legacy of Rome in the other examples that you cite in your book.
I’ve been exploring this point through the British Empire. There is an ideal of meritocracy. I’m from the UK, it’s one of the things that particularly irks me about the UK, that people seem very convinced it’s a meritocracy. It comes up in at least two, if not three or four different chapters of the book. And when people demonstrate according to a merit-based system that they are, in fact, good enough… the people in charge of that system do not like it. Don’t want to have it, aren’t interested.
You did mention that in your book, with the Indian system. Where Britain creates their version of the SATs that’s just about knowing classics, and then all the brilliant Indian scholars are like, okay, well, I can learn that.
I can learn that in English, by the way. They’re learning Greek and Latin in English, and then beating people on those tests.
And then the British decide to move the goalposts.
The immediate reaction is absolute horror. “We didn’t rig the test sufficiently to keep them out!” But it happens over and over again.
In the United States as well, with Black scholars.
A really great example, I think, is Phyllis Wheatley. She literally has to go to court to prove that she wrote these poems. But yeah, I do think a lot should be blamed on Cicero. The Roman system ties in quite nicely with the sort of individualistic idea of the world. It’s a really great series of historical events for anyone who loves a Great Man theory. Spoiler, I do not.
Shocker.
But also, Roman Stoicism has a very kind of individualistic bent. I think that really appeals to a lot of not just tech bros, but capitalists. The idea that you can just do it on your own and you don’t have to recognize anyone who helped you.
And it’s so frustrating for historians, because sometimes it feels like there’s just a giant Wheel of Fortune-style wheel back there with a bunch of random names on it. And they just spin the wheel and then Elon Musk tweets a quote that he attributes to Sulla.
Why? Wow! What a… what an interesting choice!
And then all the historians jump in, and they’re like, let’s talk about literally anything about Sulla. It just sends all the historians into a tizzy, of, here's any information about Sulla and why this is a terrible comparison. And then he just goes back and spins the wheel again, and it’s like, no, now it’s Constantine or whoever.
I think there’s actually something to that. It’s not about being right. But it’s so hard from an academic perspective to just be like, vibes-based allegiance is fine, and none of the historical details that I’ve dedicated my life to have any relevance. But I think we probably should get a little bit better at recognizing that, right? It’s not that I think scholarship doesn’t matter and historical detail doesn’t matter, but that’s not what it’s about for them. It’s about power.
I do want to get every scholar I know now a t-shirt that says “Your Vibes-Based Allegiance is Fine.” I was at Stanford the other day, and I said something like, for people who are modeling themselves on 300, it’s all about vibes. And the graduate students thought it was so funny that I said that. But it is! It’s all vibes.
Honestly, theirs is an entirely vibes-based analysis, right? I don’t think we should be mistaking that for good historical critique, or accuracy, or any of the rest of it, but there’s a reason they don’t care about the detail, because it’s not about that. They don’t care about being moral. You can’t point out that it’s immoral either, because that’s not what matters to them.
Just vibes.
And I think we have to get a little bit better at recognizing what the conversation is actually about and who we’re trying to address with our corrections. Because if you’re providing that information for other people, then that’s great! Everybody should have more opportunities to learn!
If some of Elon Musk’s fans want to learn about Sulla, then there are plenty of Roman historians online who are happy to teach them.
Yeah, good for them. But if you are hoping that you can convince Elon Musk, that’s a lost cause, and I think you should be redirecting your energies to something slightly more effective.
If you want to read more of Rhiannon’s thoughts about thinking about the Roman Empire, she’s written about it here and here: