Thinking About the Roman Empire

Origin¶

The ‘thinking about the Roman Empire’ trend is built on a simple prompt: a woman asks the man in her life - boyfriend, husband, brother, dad - how often he thinks about the Roman Empire, then films his answer. The comedy is in how frequent and unembarrassed the replies are, with men casually admitting to a few times a week or even daily. An early spark came in 2022 from Swedish influencer Saskia Cort, who told followers to try the question on their male partners. The version that detonated globally, though, is traced to a Roman reenactor and history enthusiast posting as Gaius Flavius - also based in Sweden - who in an Instagram reel around August 2023 urged, ‘Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire.’

What it means and how it is used¶

Once the clips jumped from Instagram to TikTok, ‘the Roman Empire’ became shorthand for a recurring private preoccupation that other people would never guess you had. ‘What’s your Roman Empire?’ turned into a broader conversational format: the thing - a historical event, a sports statistic, a piece of celebrity drama - that lives rent-free in your head far more than anyone realizes. It also fed a lightly joking, endlessly repeated debate about whether men and women daydream about fundamentally different things.

How it spread¶

The trend exploded across TikTok in September 2023, with ‘#RomanEmpire’ compilation videos and reaction clips accumulating billions of views. Mainstream outlets piled on within days: the Washington Post covered it on September 14, 2023, and Forbes and Time followed the same week, each trying to explain why so many men really do think about ancient Rome. Men frequently cited concrete fascinations - Roman roads and aqueducts, legionary tactics, the sheer scale and engineering of the empire - as the reasons it stuck with them. Brands, sports teams, and museums jumped in to declare their audience’s collective ‘Roman Empire’, cementing it as one of the biggest social trends of the year.

Notable examples and variations¶

• Reaction videos of men sheepishly confessing a weekly (or daily) Roman Empire habit.
• ‘What’s your Roman Empire?’ repurposed as an icebreaker across fandoms and workplaces.
• Spin-offs naming the ‘Roman Empire’ of a specific niche - a band’s discography, a game franchise, a sports rivalry.
• Marketing tie-ins from teams and brands claiming a topic as their fans’ collective obsession.

Legacy¶

The trend even drew academic attention, with scholars using it as a case study in how classical history gets reframed and gendered online. Its lasting contribution is a genuinely useful phrase: naming something ‘your Roman Empire’ has stuck as a compact way to describe an obsession that occupies more of your mind than it has any right to.