The Romans were the first to march with more engineers and support staff than fighting soldiers.
The Romans were the first to march with more engineers and support staff than fighting soldiers.
OPINION
A new American social media trend has women asking the men in their lives how often they think about the Roman Empire.
It turns out — a lot. One user’s brother answered three times a week. She doesn’t believe him, so he showed her a replica of the Colosseum he had spent the last few weeks building in Minecraft. On TikTok, the hashtag #RomanEmpire has garnered 1.2 billion views.
Rome was founded around 750 BC. At its peak, the empire it spawned spanned three continents and ruled 90 million people. That was 30 per cent of all humanity at the time. The empire ended arguably 1000 years later when the German chieftain Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus.
Gone for 1536 years, but far from forgotten. It is too big, powerful, influential and durable to be ignored. The Roman Empire deserves every inch of our brain territory that it currently occupies.
It takes a up a lot of space in my head. I was listening to the audiobook of the excellent Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age by Tom Holland when my friend texted me about the trend. Two days before that, I watched my favourite movie Gladiator with my two sons. Two years ago, I dressed up as Maximus Decimus Meridius, built a two-metre-high trebuchet and catapulted a burning payload across the lawns of the Taskmaster mansion. Like so many others, I am all in on the Roman Empire.
The original Gladiator film.
The Roman military alone is worth our time. The testudo (tortoise) formation of shields with spears sticking out is just one devastating technique among thousands of innovations they brought to warfare. Historian Dan Carlin claims in his podcast The Celtic Holocaust: “You could take the Roman army at its height in history and send it 1000 years forward in to the future, drop it back in Europe and it would mop the floor with the greatest armies of the middle ages.”
The Roman army was both a ruthless disciplined killing machine and a logistical and administrative marvel. The Romans were the first to march with more engineers and support staff than fighting soldiers. This enabled them to build the camps, bridges and forts needed to move, feed and house tens of thousands of troops. In one famous battle, in 143 BC, instead of fighting a Spanish city, a Roman commander named Lucius Metellus had a nearby river dammed and diverted. He simply washed the enemy away. Defeating them with engineering rather than swords - smart!
What about the huge wall they built in the second century to stop invaders from Scotland? Hadrian’s Wall was six metres high, three metres deep and stretched 117 kilometres. Large forts and barracks were positioned across its expanse. An impressive structure situated 2400 kilometres from Rome. Hadrian himself visited it in 122 AD. That’s a long way from home.
1872 years later author, George R. R. Martin stopped by the ruins, inspiring Game of Thrones. This wasn’t even the best thing the Romans built. Their construction was something else. They built huge bridges and stadiums, they had under-floor heating, giant aqueducts and sewage systems, while 90,000km of roads connected the cities. Their cement was so good, the Pantheon, the Pont du Gard and the aqueduct of Segovia are all still standing.
What about the gladiators? The ultimate blood sport. These were not simply fights between dudes in sandals with cool helmets and swords. The Colosseum was periodically flooded to re-enact famous oceanic conflicts. In 80 AD, Emperor Titus put on an epic naval battle featuring a dozen full-sized galley and 3000 men.
Big and impressive as the spectacle would have been, from our modern perspective, it was a shockingly immoral form of entertainment. We like to think if we were born back then, we wouldn’t attend. The truth is, we would have season tickets. We are all a product of our times. Plus, many of us, including myself, enjoy UFC, and that’s not light years away from slaves battling to the death.
The Roman Empire was impressive in so many ways, from its military prowess to its building and engineering, size, brutal politics, blood sports, hardcore philosophy and emperors (both the honourable and depraved ones). Now 1500 years since its demise, a TikTok trend shows us we are still thinking about them a lot. This is both unsurprising and ironic. Unsurprising because they left us a thousand years of amazing events and inventions to contemplate. Ironic because the depressingly vacuous brain rot being spread by TikTok will probably send America the way of Rome.
