Men love to think about Rome. Right-wing men especially love thinking about Rome, which they use to justify their imperial fantasies and narratives of political decline. But do they actually understand ancient Rome? Today we are joined by Honor Cargill-Martin, a classical historian who has punctured enduring myths. She is the author of Messalina: Empress, Adulteress, Libertine, writes the “It’s All Ancient History” Substack, and has reviewed the historical accuracy of Monty Python’s Life of Brian on YouTube. Speaking with Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson, Cargill-Martin critiques the use and abuse of Roman history by figures like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, emphasizing the need to separate myth from fact. Martin also discusses the challenges of reconstructing history accurately, using Messalina as a case study.

Nathan J. Robinson

The ancient world has much to tell us about our own time. But also, there are many ways in which, in our own time, the ancient world is invoked to justify things or to tell us stories that are not true. And so we’re having you on here to help us sort truth from fiction. 

Let’s start here with this thing that happened a couple of years ago. On TikTok, there was this viral trend where women realized that if you go up to a man and you ask, “how often do you think about ancient Rome?” the man will look at you and say “ah, probably a couple of times a week.” And women were very surprised at getting this answer. And there were many videos of women just going up to random men asking this question, and they scratch their heads, and they go, I think about it constantly—do you not? So I want to get your kind of reaction to that. First off, do you think that's true? Do they think about Ancient Rome that much, and if so, why?

Cargill-Martin

Well, I hope it’s not literally true, because I found it quite concerning, obviously. I was like, that’s so great, people are talking about Rome. It’s literally my job to think about Rome, and I don’t feel like I think about Rome as much as some of these men on TikTok are saying they’re thinking about Rome. So it gave me a bit of an existential crisis.

But I do think that Rome has an incredible draw on our imaginations. I think it has done so for all history, particularly since we started rediscovering more about it since the Renaissance. And so I’m not surprised that people are still compelled by it.

Robinson  

Well, you wrote this wonderful op-ed for the New York Times a couple of months back. And one of the things that you point out in that is that when people think they’re thinking about Rome, they're not necessarily really thinking about the Roman Empire that actually existed. In fact, the title of your article is, “The Roman Empire loved by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon never existed.” Can you talk about this way in which you can think about Rome without really thinking about the thing that the Roman Empire actually was?

Cargill-Martin 

Yes, I think there are kind of two layers to it. Firstly, when we think about Rome, we tend to think about a Rome that has been very mythologized in the 500 years since the Renaissance, and we think about the Rome that we’ve seen in Gladiator, in Monty Python, things like that. So there’s this layer of mythology on top of it, because people have been compelled by it for so long.

But also, the other thing that we forget about and that gets lost is, very often, when we reference the Roman Empire as this monolithic thing, the fact is the Roman state goes through these radically different iterations. So obviously, for the first 500 years—the first 700 years, according to Rome’s own calculations of their history—they are a republic, and then after that, they are ruled by single emperors. So when people talk about the Roman Empire, they are generally talking about that whole sweep of history. But if you say the Roman Empire in a more kind of academic setting, you are speaking about a very specific portion of that history, and I think that that tends to get lost. And even within that kind of breakdown between the republic and the empire, there are many people who now argue that we can’t, for example, talk about one Roman Republic, but really this republic is kind of lost and reformulated in these very different ways over that historical period.

Robinson

Well, you’ve told us about the complexity here, that we should be careful of simple stories because this is a civilization that lasted a long time, had many rulers, and went through many phases. And so, the many narratives that we could construct about this will be oversimplifications, and they are going to distort our understanding. So tell us a little bit more about the specific kinds of myths and narratives that have been passed down, that you try to combat in your work as a historian.

Cargill-Martin 

I think one of the great myths that comes down to us is that Rome is defined by the superior character of its citizens—that its citizens are in some sense more manly, more hardy, less corruptible than, say, the people they’re conquering in the east. And that is a myth that the Romans went to great pains to try and propagate about themselves. It is how they looked at their history. They thought that they gained this great empire because they were divinely favored, that they were essentially morally superior to a lot of the people that they were enacting dominion over.

And I think we see that in almost all the media that we have about Rome today. We think of centurions and gladiators, and obviously Rome was a very male-dominated society. I would never want to “revisionist history” that fact away. The vast majority of the people who were making significant and political impacts and decisions in Rome were men. But I think the society was so much more complicated than that. There were women who made huge impacts on politics, particularly once you move into the dynastic era of empire, and that’s really what my book was about. But then there are also people who had a huge impact on the day to day running of the empire.

So you start to get this kind of imperial infrastructure of enslaved people and freed people who were exerting mammoth amounts of power. But they’re not the kind of image of Romans that we tend to think about when we think of sort of togaed emperors or cuirassed centurions. 

Robinson

One of the themes of your op-ed was that these figures on the political right—and you cite Elon Musk and Steve Bannon and some others—invoke selectively the classical world to tell the story that they want to tell about our present time. But that story isn’t necessarily accurate. You talk about how Elon Musk—who’s basically obsessed with population decline and single-handedly trying to reverse that decline by producing as many little mini Elon Musks as he possibly can, in a way that’s very gross—says, well, look at Rome. The population decline is responsible for the collapse of the Roman Empire; therefore, I have to have as many little Musks as possible. So tell us how accurate his history is.

Cargill-Martin

What a way of justifying it. If you have to turn to the collapse of Rome to justify your love life, maybe something has gone a little wrong along the way. I think the way that people use the Roman Empire very often in this sort of discourse is they turn to it almost like an oracle that is going to give us a direct insight into the future trajectory of our state. And obviously that is not the case.

The difference in conditions between now and ancient Rome is just immeasurable. We are working with a completely different set of media. We are working with a totally different constitution. We are working with a completely different philosophical basis for our society and for how we think about politics. So it is never going to be directly comparable.

Where I think Rome can be incredibly helpful is as a kind of tool to think with. I think America, particularly, was built so consciously, not in imitation of Rome, but in sort of comparison to it, and that was such an important theme right from the start. And obviously, we have the benefit of hindsight with Rome. We’re detached from it. We can maybe see interesting things in Rome that we can then take and think about and apply to our own society.

So I do think it can be a useful tool for thinking about politics now. But I think where it becomes very dangerous is when you say this happened in Rome. I would also take issue with the idea that what Elon Musk and Steve Bannon said happened in Rome actually happened in Rome—when you take any claim about Rome and you say, and thus it will happen now. 

Robinson

So even if it did, it’s still not—

Cargill-Martin

Even if it did, this is a civilization 2,000 years ago that was a slave society before the advent of Christianity, and they were ruled by single emperors. They don’t have income tax. It’s just such a wildly different society in ways that we cannot even begin to imagine. Their whole framework for looking at the world was just so radically different from ours. 

Robinson

Yes, you said there about how ancient Rome could be used as this oracle to create this story about what must inevitably happen in the future. And you also cite Vice President JD Vance, who said, “we are in a late Republican period,” evoking this view of America as Rome that awaits a dictator for its salvation. And he has used this to say that—his quote is, “conservatives are going to have to get pretty far out there, pretty wild,” by which he means discarding constitutional norms.

Can you talk a little bit about the danger of this conception of the fact that Rome passed from a republic to an empire, being used to tell a kind of similar story about how the United States must go?

Cargill-Martin  

Yes, I think that’s actually a really interesting way to put it. And that idea that this is a sort of teleological, cyclical thing of moving from republic into empire, and that this is a necessary development in Rome’s history, I think comes straight from the Romans themselves.

So when Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, comes to power, he puts a great deal of work into presenting himself as the natural culmination of Rome’s heroic history, and as the sort of preordained savior of Rome and the man who was going to initiate this new golden age. So this idea that the empire is a kind of necessary and yet almost preordained next stage in Rome’s political development comes completely and directly from the propaganda needs of the first emperor, and it’s now just being parroted again.

And you could potentially argue that, in a sense, it’s being—I'm not saying that JD Vance is going to try and violently overtake America, but I do think that there are similarities in how it’s being used, in that it’s being used as justification for enacting strategies of politics that go beyond the well established political norms of society, because you’re saying that this is a period of transition that is necessary for us to go through. And so we need to potentially rethink these conventions that we are clutching on to, potentially wrongly.

Robinson 

You also wrote a Substack post at the beginning of this year about a Greek historian who had a theory of the cyclical changes of forms of government. You called your post, “Do all democracies have to die?” It's about this guy who had this theory that can sound very compelling because it’s a story about how democracy can’t last.

Cargill-Martin

Yes, so the best verbalization of the theory comes down to us in Polybius, who is the historian I was talking about in that post. But it is a very deeply ingrained idea in ancient society. I think the ancients, perhaps far more than us, thought about all history as being cyclical and as being sort of intrinsically, generally, unless you can really do something about it, tending towards a history of decline. So the ancients think about their whole world as having come about because we declined from the Age of Gold, to the Age of Silver, to the Age of Heroes, and now into the kind of bad age of mortal vice that we are currently living under. So the starting point of your whole vision of the universe is as a world that is tending towards decline naturally. And they applied that then to their political systems.

There is this idea that all political systems start off very well. You can have three main types of political systems: monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. And all of those are good forms, and each of them will naturally decay because of seeds of instability and vice that are intrinsic to that form of government. So each governmental form will decay. It will then be replaced by the next governmental form in the cycle. So monarchy decays into tyranny, is replaced by aristocracy, which decays into oligarchy, is replaced by democracy, which decays into mob rule, and the system sort of starts again.

And I do think that it’s very impactful on how the ancients thought about everything in their political world. But I also think it is quite reflective of a very human and recognizable tendency to look at your political surroundings and to assume that things have got worse, and to assume that there is a danger that they're going to get worse still, and that perhaps the only way to deal with that is to start again. It’s a cultural thing, but I do think that is also a quite human assumption underlying it.

Robinson

And no disrespect to Polybius, who I’m sure was very clever, but it’s kind of dangerously wrong in a certain way. We don’t have empirical proof that democracy is destined to die. There are plenty of democracies that have lasted a long time, or the trajectory has been quite positive. You live in Britain, and the story of British democracy—yes, of course, there are threatening right-wing tides and trends in Britain, but the story of British democracy is the story of successive enfranchisement of greater parts of the population. You could tell a totally different story about history.

And you talk about, in your op-ed, the danger of this narrative of decline. You say, “the narrative of decline allowed politicians throughout Rome’s history to claim that Rome simultaneously was the greatest civilization on earth”—echoes of Trump there, “greatest country in the world”—“and was in the sort of grave political crisis that required extraordinary and often unconstitutional political intervention.” Again, Trump.

Cargill-Martin

Yes. I think the rhetoric of decline is so compelling because it allows people to play both on civic pride and on people’s fear that everything is going to get worse and that everything will descend into chaos. I think it is actually one of the most powerful political rhetorical devices that we have ever come across, and so it’s no surprise that we see it in Rome and that we see it today.

It’s interesting that those connections are being so directly made, but it comes out of the same sort of underlying political necessities in both cases. I think also, with Polybius’s theory, that it’s not just that we know that democracies don’t always decline. It’s that we know that even in Polybius’s recent history, he would have been able to see that it is not the case that tyrannies are generally replaced by aristocracies, which are then replaced by democracies. It’s very often that mob rule will turn into oligarchy, or that tyranny will turn directly into democracy.

So I think they must have known that this was essentially a theoretical oversimplification that allowed them to categorize how they were thinking about constitutional relationships between different forms of government and how they were thinking about the tendency of states to decline. And Polybius’s overall point is that Rome has been so successful in part because its constitution managed to sort of combine those three forms, and that was what had made it able to take over so much of the Mediterranean world, and what he was positing might actually save Rome over the longer run. So he clearly also knows that this is not completely set in stone.

Robinson

One of the themes of what we’ve discussed so far is the need to critically examine simple stories about civilizations, that can be propagandistic or can be done to further an agenda. One of the difficulties that you face as a historian is disentangling the stories that are told by people within the civilization from the actual facts of what happened. You’re talking about how people like Bannon and Musk oversimplify or misunderstand the actual facts of Roman history, but you point out that they do so in part because these stories are spread within the civilization itself. So you face a formidable task as a historian of distinguishing the propaganda of the time from what is actually occurring.

Cargill-Martin

Oh my God, absolutely. It is the eternal problem of the ancient historian that our evidence is so fragmentary, and also that it is more biased than basically any sort of modern history towards the opinions of the elite. And so it is incredibly hard to separate propaganda from reality.

There has been some incredibly useful work done in recent years with archeological data that has really led us to question a lot of the theories that we had held for a long time about, say, population decline, and the relationship of that to the fall of the Republic and also to the Empire, which is obviously the theory that Musk was promoting. It has become clear in recent years that there is not this kind of long-term dramatic population decline, which leads directly into the fall of the Empire. There are some demographic shocks, but they seem to be much more related to limited external events, so things like the Antonine and Cyprian plagues, and we can draw a much less clear line from that into the failure of the Empire than we thought that we could do 70 years ago. It was a very satisfying narrative, but unfortunately, it does not appear to be true.

And that’s a really good example of a place where, had we not gained that new information that we gained really quite recently, we would have no reason to doubt the narratives that we were being given, and no reason to think about the political reasons that might be underlying the propagation of those narratives in the first place. And so I think it reminds you, when you look at something like that, that you have to think about the reasoning that might lie behind any sort of pronouncement or claim or diagnosis.

Nathan Robinson 

Yes, you point out in your Times op-ed that you could read the leading Roman historians and end up reaching wrong conclusions about Rome.  You say “Livy complained that the Romans of his day could endure neither our vices nor their cures.” You talk about how “Sallust attributed the political conversions, convulsions of the late Republic to the vices. He believed that it spread through Rome like a deadly [plague].” So you could go back to the best historians at the time and end up completely wrong.

Cargill-Martin 

The focus on vice and political vice is so indicative of how the Romans viewed their world. This is a world in which there is no separation between, say, politics and religion—there is a much more porous boundary between this world and the divine world—and there is not so much of a written constitution in Rome as there is, say, in America. So much more of it is based on normative conventions of behavior. And so the separation between a world of political action, moral action, and an even kind of divine favor, all of those boundaries are much more blurred.

So you are much more likely to read any sort of political crisis as a crisis of human vice, and potentially of resultant divine displeasure. Part of it is this political narrative, but also part of it is that it’s just the first place that the ancient mind will tend to go. You see it, for example, every time they have a military crisis. The first thing that they will try and do is work out where there have been sources of religious pollution in the city, and they will try and do ceremonies of expiation. So it clearly is just the first thought.

So you have that. And then you have the additional layer that this is a very useful narrative, if you are coming in and saying, as a politician, I can identify this point of crisis, and I’m going to fix it, and we will restore the great virtue of the Roman people that has given us this empire.

So you have these two layers of bias, both conscious and unconscious, that we need to try and sort of strip back.

Robinson

Well, you have a whole Substack post about the Spartans fighting the Persians, and how our understanding of what actually happened in the war comes, in part, from the quite satisfying and self-adulatory story that the Greeks tell about what happened after the fact.

Cargill-Martin 

Yes. I think Thermopylae is such a perfect case study because we can see the layers as they grow up over time. So the story that we tell about Thermopylae is that it’s these 300 heroic Spartans holding off the entire invasion army of the Persian king of kings, and that it is this battle between the liberty-loving Greeks and this sort of invading evil bogeyman Persian Empire. And that is a very compelling story.

But I think when you actually look at the history, you can see that the real story is a little less satisfying. It’s actually a much larger Greek force, just kind of centered around this elite Spartan 300, and it’s also a pretty terrible defeat. In the short run, everyone is killed. They don’t hold off the Persian army for that long. But it is rewritten very quickly because it’s an incredibly useful propaganda sort of coup for the Greeks. It’s a way to say to the other great states who are perhaps on the fence about whether to go over to the Persian side, this is the heroic image in which you should be fighting, to unite the Greek forces against the Persian enemy.

So there’s that first layer of immediate necessity of propaganda. And then over the hundreds of years that follow, we see new elements being added to the story. We get these very dramatic, almost cinematic scenes of the Spartans leaving Sparta when they know they’re going to die. We get all these incredible quotes that we see verbatim, essentially, in the movie 300, things like “eat well, because tonight we dine in hell,” or “molon labe” which means “come and take them,” which is what the Spartan commander allegedly says when the Persian king demands that he lay down his weapons. And I think those additions are reflective of what is becoming a mythologization of Sparta as a whole in the hundreds of years between Thermopylae and the first century BC and AD writers.

Sparta is becoming this iconic symbol of a very specific way of life. So you get all of these legends being attached to this great Spartan moment. And then now we see these things being used in a different way, for different purposes. So molon labe, as you know, is quite often used as a sort of slogan by far-right groups, by pro-gun groups, and the way in which they’re using it is to assert their liberty from governmental intervention, which is an entirely different sort of liberty to the liberty that the Greeks were asserting. They were asserting liberty in terms of the liberty of a state to govern itself as it chose. There was no sense then that the individuals within that state had liberty from their government's decisions. Sparta was an incredibly non-individualistic society. Everyone was essentially forced to live as the state commanded and to subsume themselves into this militaristic culture.

Robinson  

As I was reading your work to prepare for this, these themes of distinguishing story from fact came up over and over. I couldn’t help but think about the historians 2,000 years in the future of our own time. I thought, “What if the only thing that survives is Donald Trump's speeches, the picture of him standing up after the assassination attempt, and Curtis Yarvin’s blog posts?” And the future historians are trying to piece together a narrative. They’re like, “well, there was a crisis of manliness, the civilization was in decline, and then finally, it had its redeemer...”

Cargill-Martin

Oh my God. It’s terrifying. That is a horrible image. Thank you so much. I think the one element of hope that I would say is that now the forms of media that are open to politicians are also very often open to the people and to their opponents. So with social media and newspapers, things like that, you’re getting both sides, whereas the forms of media that survive from the ancient world were very much forms of media that were only open to the ruling classes. So things like inscriptions, honorific sculptures, and also written works are really written by members of the male elite. And so you get quite a good picture, sometimes, of factions and kind of problems and tensions within the elite, but we get a very poor picture of what people beyond that league thought.

The forms of media in which they were expressing their political opinions, which we get these kinds of tantalizing glimpses of, were very ephemeral. It was things like shouting at politicians in the theater, or scrawling witty graffiti over the bottom of someone’s sculpture, or actually even setting up private shrines to murdered populists. So we get these kinds of glimpses of how they were expressing their opinion, but they were not expressing it in ways that survive over a period of 2,000 years.

Robinson

No, that’s a very good point. The thing that makes that horrible nightmare scenario of the future that I outlined less likely, or seem less plausible, is the fact that our own writings will probably survive if Curtis Yarvin’s do. As you say, the production of media has opened up a lot to a broader public. 

That gets me to the kind of final theme that I wanted to discuss. Because, as you pointed out there, Roman history was written by men. And you wrote an entire book about the woman who may be the most slandered woman in history, the victim of one of these narratives that begins in the works of the greatest historians of the time, and persists for thousands of years. She has kind of gone away a bit now, but for a long time, her name became a stand-in for—to be impolite—a conniving slut.

Cargill-Martin  

Yes, I think that’s a good way to put it. I think what’s actually sadder is that very often it lost the conniving, because at least with a conniving slut, there’s a sense of using some agency, whereas I think very often it was just about sex. It was really interesting because the book just came out in Brazil, and I was speaking to a journalist there, and he was saying that there, it is still used day to day. It’s just a word for it.

Robinson

Poor Messalina. Tell us a little bit about her and how she became one of the most slandered people in history.

Cargill-Martin 

So she was the Empress of Rome. She was the wife of the Emperor Claudius between 41 and 48 AD, and she fell into these incredibly dramatic circumstances. She was killed in the autumn of 48 after allegedly having bigamously married her lover, kind of plotted against the Emperor, and alongside her at least 11 of her alleged lovers were also killed.

In the years after that, as you can imagine, her memory is completely unprotected, so all of the media that might have survived about Messalina, all the kinds of sculptures and inscriptions, are destroyed by decree of the Senate. And so then we have this vacuum in which people can give reign to all the most slanderous rumors.

And I think they have an awful lot of fun with it. There are kinds of stories about her having competitions with a prostitute for who can sleep with more men in 24 hours, about her leaving the palace every night and going to work in a brothel. And I think that these are reflective of, firstly, the fact that Messalina falls and is immediately replaced by another Empress. And so there is this desire to blacken the name of the predecessor so that there is political scope for her successor to be popular. And then I think there is also a much less personal thing, and that actually Messalina just becomes an arena for Roman men to work through every sort of anxiety or prejudice that they have about women because her name is completely unprotected. So all of that can just be placed onto Messalina as a symbol of everything that is wrong with women.

But the reason I found her story so compelling is that, as well as those great gossipy stories, which were obviously a lot of fun to write about, when you actually look at her history, it’s clear that she is an immense political force in that period, in quite conniving, evil ways, very often. She is killing a lot of her political enemies, but she’s doing so very successfully, and I think that she deserves more credit for that. She’s developing a lot of kind of new strategies of core politics, which are conniving, but are very effective and will have a big impact on Rome for the next 100 years, or maybe more.

Robinson

So, as we’ve said here, there’s a huge challenge as a historian in distinguishing narrative from fact. And you basically set yourself one of the most challenging tasks you could have by taking someone about whom nothing that was written could really be trusted. And I think you say at one point that the things that we can say for certain about Messalina fit into a single paragraph, and your job was to write an entire book in which most of what you’re dealing with will be malicious, deceitful lies. So what do you do?

Cargill-Martin  

Well, I think the great thing about the period in which Messalina lives is that it is a period about which we know genuinely a great deal. So it’s very easy for us to reconstruct the world, both material and political, that Messalina is living in. We can say a lot about what she’s seeing, how people think about women, what her role in politics is. And then actually, because there is so much written, even though there is this layer of slander about Messalina, we can actually reconstruct—I was very surprised by how much I found. I initially thought that I was going to have to do it much more thematically and use Messalina as a way of looking at different aspects of Roman life, court politics, women, things like that. I felt like she encapsulated a lot of the sort of drama and fear and rumor of the Julio-Claudian period—and glamor as well. So that’s why I was originally going to do it that way.

But the more I looked at it, the more I felt like you actually can reconstruct a proper narrative of her life, which is how I ended up structuring it. When you look at the historical sources, and you are aware of the bias that is laid on top of them, every time you see something which does not align with that overarching narrative about Messalina, that’s something we might be interested in, and then that’s something that we can investigate more. And because the narrative about her becomes so strong, there are many instances then, when historians are going back and trying to write this period of history, you can see them almost struggling to fit incongruous material about, say, her political power, into this narrative of her as a sort of frivolous slut. And that shows up—that tension shows up in the historical record, and then we can fit that into the great amount that we know about the political world of the period, and we can reconstruct a pretty full image of what she’s doing.

Robinson 

I’m fascinated that you said that, because I write a lot about the United States foreign policy, and I co-wrote a book with Noam Chomsky. And our book is an account of U.S. foreign policy over the past 60 years that’s very critical, and one of the things that we do to make sure that it’s reliable is to secure documents that basically are admissions against interest. If we can cite the State Department itself admitting civilian casualty figures, or if we’re studying the Vietnam War, if we can use the pro-war historians rather than the anti-war historians—if you can find the pro-war historians and can find admissions or facts that they wouldn’t state if it weren’t true, and they’re being forced to state because they can’t escape the evidence. So a really good method of finding reliable things is to find the person who wouldn’t want to have to admit this and get them on the record.

Cargill-Martin 

That’s so interesting. Actually, I love that comparison. I think, in a way, it’s almost harder to write the history accurately of a completely beloved emperor—well, allegedly completely beloved emperor—like Trajan because everything is pro him, but it’s also essentially written under him or under his successors. It’s so hard to work out where there are these gaps. That’s a really interesting comparison.

Robinson

If people don’t know, I want to just emphasize here how much the  Messalina myth was propagated over the thousands of years afterward. You trace it through the popular culture, and it’s just amazing how this woman’s name gets totally detached from the actual reality of her life across many different societies—you just mentioned Brazil and France. The whole world now has slandered Messalina.

Cargill-Martin 

Yes, I think what we see in Brazil now would also have been true in France and Britain 200 years ago, maybe even less. She’s used as like a shorthand for a badly behaved woman, but also, I think she becomes this focus of artistic obsession, particularly towards the end of the 19th century. She becomes this symbol of like debauchery and decadence. And I think there’s a real interest in that. But every time, what she’s been kind of used to portray is almost completely divorced from the details of her life. She becomes a byword for whatever form of vice or kind of tempting but corrupted debauchery you were trying to refer to.

Robinson 

I want to return here, just at the end, to this idea of what we get in our attempt to understand our own time from studying the ancient world. You wrote another New York Times op-ed that was very interesting, about the way that the right was attacking Kamala Harris during the Biden administration. By studying the ancient world and seeing how stories about “backstabbing women behind the throne” or women as a power behind the throne developed, you can actually see similar myths as they develop in our own time. And you talked about how the right would say all these things about how, well, Joe Biden is totally powerless—it’s Kamala who wields the real power. Now, I think we know now that Joe Biden was, in fact, in fairly poor health during his presidency, but I don’t think there’s any evidence that Kamala Harris was running the show behind the scenes. So it’s very interesting to ask the question, well, why this story? Why does this kind of story develop?

Cargill-Martin  

Yes, and I think it gets to the heart, really, of why I find classics so fascinating in general. Because I don’t think that there is another time in history where we know so much, including day to day accounts of some periods, and incredibly personal letters from some Romans. We have this incredible insight into the most intimate realms of how the Romans thought. I don’t think there is any other point in history where we have that for a society that is so distant from us—their starting point is, in so many ways, so different.

So when we see these similarities in the way they want to look at things, the way that they find things work in politics, we can begin to ask whether those are perhaps things that are just universal to humans. Whether there is always a tendency to have this fear that there is some sort of sinister power going on behind your politicians, whether there is a sort of natural tendency to view that as a more feminine thing, whether there is always anxiety about the potential decline of your society, both numerically and morally. And so I don’t know whether those things really are intrinsic features of human thought, or whether they just kind of trickle down to us from the Romans through this kind of endless cultural whispers, but I do think it’s an interesting question, and I, personally, find endlessly compelling.

Robinson  

We talk mostly about politics here at Current Affairs, but you also talk about how there are other relatable qualities the ancients have, such as when you read their writings about love and relationships. You have this wonderfully titled Substack post called “Your most toxic romantic desires are 2,000 years old.” So across every dimension of life you can see—the phrase you had was, “the strange mirror that has flattered and horrified every Western Empire” you called Rome. A strange mirror.

Cargill-Martin  

Yes, because it is that thing, that it seems very similar to our culture in certain very significant ways, and that almost obscures a lot of the different assumptions that are underlying a lot of the way that Romans think and interact. And so it can be very useful. But I think we also have to just be so careful that, even if it looks like the Romans have ended up in the same place in terms of whatever they’re arguing or thinking, we can’t assume that they necessarily got there in the same way.

Transcript edited byPatrick Farnsworth.