Oh, You Fools—Don’t You Realize the Biggest Rome Freaks Are Women?

When Irene Soto Marín, an assistant professor of Roman history at Harvard, goes on a first date with a man, one of two things usually happens: They’ll either start mansplaining facts about the Empire that she already knows, like, say, that Cleopatra was Greek or that she had a child with Julius Caesar. Or they’ll hit her with a bunch of bogus “facts.” Then, a prospective suitor attempted to convince her the Shroud of Turin—as in, the fabled burial shroud that wrapped the body of Jesus of Nazareth—was real and that it contained DNA remnants of the Son of God. Stupefied, Marín asked how we could ever be able to confirm that a strand of DNA belonged to Jesus, while simultaneously signaling for the check.

Marín is a Rome Woman for life. Like many other academics of her expertise, she’s fascinated by the idea that thousands of years ago, deep in the mists of antiquity, people toiled under the same weaknesses and strengths—miraculous kindness, petty grievance—that tell the recursive story of human civilization. If you ask what originally sparked her curiosity in Rome, she will cite an early Sunday school lesson, back in her native Costa Rica, when she learned how Judas betrayed Jesus at the Last Supper for 30 pieces of silver. The nature of the ransom never left her imagination—what, exactly, could someone purchase with a purse full of precious metal in Roman Jerusalem?

So perhaps it was fate that her academic specialty became the economics of the empire. Marín has written an entire dissertation on the way currency flowed through the borders; she has spent whole evenings of her life examining restored papyrus accounting scripts—the only way one can enumerate all the ceramic pots that transferred from the steaming Nile delta to the freezing outer Mediterranean. She is, in other words, a proud imperial geek, and quite frankly, she’s grown tired of the idea that women like her don’t exist.

“It’s an attitude of ‘Even though you’re a Harvard professor with a Ph.D. in the subject, I’m going to teach you and mark my territory,’ ” she continued. “Very rarely are they OK with the idea that I know more about the Roman Empire than them.”

The subject has been top of mind for Marín lately, after a meme brought about a very masculine Latin reckoning. It all started with an Instagram Reel, made on Aug. 19, by a Romanophile page called @Gaiusflavius. “Ladies, many of you do not realize how often men think about the Roman Empire,” read the post’s text, superimposed onto crumbling Tuscan columns. “Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother, you will be surprised by their answers.”

The clip garnered nearly 2 million views, and before long, every social media channel on the web overflowed with women interrogating men about their Latinist proficiency. Naturally, many of those men insisted they were possessed by legionnaire fantasies—claiming that they ponder the empire once, twice, even three times a week. (“Every day,” replied the husband of TikTokker Ashley Whitlock. When she pressed him for specifics about his Roman enthusiasm, he cited the ancient “infrastructure” and “roads,” responses that quickly made him a sensation on the platform.)

In the past week, I myself have received two texts—apropos of nothing—from women wondering how often I think about the Roman Empire. (Not as much as you might think; the Civil War and Napoleon will always have my top two spots. I suppose I’m a modernist at the end of the day.) But I do understand why they asked. The Romans have been presented as a conservative, übermensch ideal in the broadest arenas of pop culture; what with all the chiseled-marble abdominals, well-drilled military formations, and, yes, highly sectorial philosophical ideations on class, citizenship, and statehood. It’s no surprise that some of the most annoying and psychotic gadflies on the extreme right have weaved in Roman iconography as part of their digital brand, and frankly, if someone were to assume that I was a huge ancient Rome guy, I’d at least want to investigate what vibes I was giving off to make them feel such a way.

All that said, I studied history in college, which means I spent a good amount of time adjacent to a classics department at a gigantic state school. This, I feel, gives me enough authority to say that the idea that thinking about ancient Rome—an empire that ran vertical from northern Africa to primordial Britannia, encompassing hundreds of unique cultures and dialects, a vibrant trove of art and literature, and some of the most compelling characters to ever walk the Earth—as exclusively something boys do is a flop. The Classics Department Girl is a crucial fixture of society. I’ve known plenty of them myself, and her experience has been totally hijacked by the infernal TikToks.

“For a long time I taught Introduction to Ancient Rome, and it filled up immediately. I could cap it at 200 or 400 students; it didn’t matter, and the gender divide was consistently equally balanced,” said Jen Ebbeler, an associate professor at the University of Texas, who studies—alongside Rome—early Christianity. “My approach is very historical and political. We do a lot of military history, we talk a lot about infrastructure, and there’s never been a gender difference in who likes the content. The women aren’t coming up to me and asking to learn more about, I don’t know, the history of marriage in ancient Rome.”

Ebbeler told me that the international community of ancient historians is composed of a fairly commensurate mix of men and women—they might not be at total parity, but it’s close. The status quo has improved over time, especially compared to Ebbeler’s first intrepid steps into academia—during which leery university job interviewers asked about her marital status. Her assertion bears out in the data: in 2012, 49 percent of the master’s degrees in history were awarded to women, compared to 28 percent in 1966 (though it’s unclear how many of them were scholars of Rome).

Ebbeler argues that the diversification of Roman researchers has thoroughly improved the bedrock of scholarship about the empire. As it turns out, women, once a stark minority in the field, were well equipped to think about Rome beyond the motley crew of Julius, Augustus, and Trajan. “One area of Romanist studies that women have set the standard for is on topics like slavery, and what you’d call ‘history from below’—essentially, the lives of the non-elites in Rome. I think women have been better at paying attention to that in the last 20 years,” said Ebbeler. “Today everyone does that—men and women—but you can trace the trajectory to female historians.”

Ebbeler also notes that certain Romanist academic rigors are beginning to become a little less masculine in nature, which might mirror the changing demographics in the scholarship. In the past, she said, the AP Latin examination was centered on Julius Caesar, who wrote a gruff, stoic, and outrageously dull accounting of his battles in Gaul and Africa. “I’ve taught Caesar before, and nobody likes it! It’s annoying as heck,” continued Ebbeler. But going forward, the exam will be centered on Pliny, who composed letters about much brighter topics—aqueduct engineering, speechcraft, and so on. “I think that also speaks to how, in reality, the interest in Rome is not confined to military conquest,” she said.

Ayelet Lushkov, another professor at UT who counts herself as a lifelong Rome obsessive with a particular interest in Latin literature, goes a step further. She argues that the version of the Roman Empire men might claim to be captivated by—codified in highly aestheticized video games and films, crimson blood splattered on shining porcelain walls, wanton decadence and excess, Joaquin Phoenix pointing his quivering thumb down in Gladiator—is, at best, a highly simplified interpretation of the history. If this is the Rome you’re thinking about, then you’re not thinking about Rome at all. In truth, the empire, like so many other societies, was blemished by asphyxiating bureaucracy, institutional precarity, and flat-out genteel cowardice. Much to the disappointment of the bro-intellectual illuminati, this was not a place worth aspiring to.

“There were very few Romans who had positions of authority, and even fewer of them that were any good at wielding power. Most of them were forced to go on military adventures that they didn’t want to go on, and they basically sat in the background while everyone else did the work. Cicero, the famous Roman orator, spent a long time trying to avoid any military service whatsoever,” said Lushkov. “There’s a trauma inherent with prolonged military service. We don’t have great evidence on PTSD in Rome, but it must’ve been prevalent. It’s not all fun and games. There’s an aspect of humanity in Roman society that we tend to lose track of, even if we’re thinking about the privileged elite.”

Lushkov agrees with Ebbeler that in recent years, classics departments across the country have become much more friendly to those outside the white male hegemony. Slowly but surely, they’ve become a fertile realm for all women—undergrad and postdocs alike—who have a roiling fetish for ancient Rome. They gather in group chats and library conference rooms, debating ceramic patterns and the hexameters of Ovid deep into the night. Chicken soup for the Romaphilic soul.

“I don’t want to say that we solved all the problems in classics, but it’s increasingly possible for rooms full of women to get together and dork out about Rome,” said Lushkov. “It’s been nice to send graduate students into support networks that have a lot of women involved. And to be able to refer them to role models in the field, because they can relate to particular issues that women tend to face.”

This is a message that Marín hammered home, toward the end of our call, when I asked her how she’d mold the next generation of femme Roman scholars. Could she prove to them that thinking about the empire is not just for boys—regardless of what TikTok might lead them to believe? I assumed she was going to cite a selection of inspiring ancient women, artists, playwrights, socialites, and patricians who might be able to stir their imagination. But instead, Marín said she simply believes that any woman can help the world understand ancient Rome better with their curiosity alone, because too few of them have been offered the opportunity to do so in the first place.

“All of the histories about the Roman Empire have been, in large part, written by men, and have been unsurprisingly colored by their experience of being a man in the world,” said Marín. “I try to get more women involved in our ancient history department at Harvard, and I tell them that just by being who you are, you’re going to offer a different perspective on the way these histories are told.”