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Comment by kergonath | Hacker News Reader

> hey, maybe Rome wasn't always a progressive advanced bastion of civilization that we should emulate, maybe a lot of people (even the privileged of the time) had terrible experiences, and maybe some of the regular glorification of the past that we engage in is misplaced, both materially and morally?

Isn’t this a straw man, though? Roman art and culture has a very important part in western minds, if only because our culture largely descends from theirs. But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever. Even the enlightenment philosophers, to which we owe things like the American and French revolution and gave to their institutions a Roman-like patina, were well aware of the imperfection of the Roman systems. They knew about the social wars, the Gracchi and the fall of the Republic. And that was in the 1600s and 1700s.

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> But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever.

I think that many segments of modern society have a tendency to look at history through rose colored glasses and underrate how awful it was for everyone involved, even when it's couched with "but of course you wouldn't want to actually live there."

But this is tricky to talk about because it's not a universal tendency and it doesn't hit everyone the same way. Some people have a tendency to look at history through the opposite lens as if the people involved in it weren't human beings at all and were too primitive and desperate to have any relatable emotion. And the existence of those people who treat history like it was just a primitive hell is why you tend to see memes about getting scammed by a brass merchant being so popular, because it feels like a very human everyday experience and it contradicts that opposite narrative.

Maybe you haven't ever encountered anyone saying that Rome was the GOAT, I'm not going to say you're wrong about that if that's not your experience. But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta. There is a real tendency I see to abstract history in a way that papers over the humanity of the people involved, and I think that pointing out that the people involved were human beings who suffered in human ways that are genuinely horrible (sometimes horrible to such extremes that it is difficult to internalize and empathize with) -- I think that has some value in punching through that instinct in both directions because whether people are glorifying or demonizing history, the thing that unites both of those instincts is the reduction of the people involved to caricatures and actors rather than human beings.

But your millage may vary; I don't know what parts of culture you're embedded in or whether you ever find yourself around people who fall into that trap. Maybe you don't. All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.

> But then I remember seeing people get weird online about criticisms of Sparta.

Ah yes, you’re certainly right about those, good point. They are indeed a good example of what you say (and of course their specific kind of delusion has been convincingly shown as divorced from any kind of historical reality *).

> All I can say is that my experience doesn't match yours, and I do run into people who glorify history, and I do run into people who glorify Rome.

Using history for propaganda purposes is not that rare, see e.g. Putin doing it with the old Russian empire right now. But my understanding is that they even the people buying into this are happy to rant about how great their country used to be but would not want to actually live at the time they glorify. Even Russian nationalists know how bad life was for the vast majority of the population under Catherine the Great. It’s usually some aspects they want to emulate, it the whole experience. Of course there is the counter-example you mentioned of spartanophile who have too much confidence in their manliness and toughness and who would not be against raping a helot or killing a wolf every now and then…

* https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta

:) Oh I'm so glad you linked that, because I was trying to find that same blog series and couldn't figure out the right phrase to search, and I was so mad that I hadn't bookmarked it when I originally ran into it.

Doing all these variations of "sparta lord of the rings GoT blog" and just getting links to IMDB pages...

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Yeah, it's really tricky to talk about this because one of two things can be true:

A) there could actually be a culture of people who need to hear about this and you're just fortunate enough not to be embedded in that culture, or

B) maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.

And it can sometimes be really hard to make a credible argument in either direction. I can't think of any evidence I can give that I see this as a problem other than... anecdotally I see it. But obviously that's not evidence.

> :) Oh I'm so glad you linked that, because I was trying to find that same blog series and couldn't figure out the right phrase to search, and I was so mad that I hadn't bookmarked it when I originally ran into it.

Happy to help, I certainly get a lot of mileage from that one:) A convenient one is also the series on the Fremen mirage, which is another trope tough guys like to throw around: https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-fremen-mirage . It’s actually related to the point you were making. These people like to talk about the fall of Rome and decadence as if what came before was a kind of golden age, but I don’t think their reasoning prowess goes far enough to actually come up with some arguments as to what was better before and why. They are focused on what went bad (disintegration, obviously because men were weak, women were rebellious, and there were immigrants).

> maybe it's the Twitter phenomenon where a news article reads a tweet that was liked 5 times and then makes a controversy about what society believes now. Or maybe I'm embedded in such a narrow sub-culture where I'm more likely to see wild takes about the past.

Yeah, it’s difficult to gauge this sort of things now because Twitter is such an echo chamber, and the most vocal communities are not the largest. I don’t claim to be perfectly informed either, far from it. Imperfect as it is, mainstream media provides a better view, I think. The future will be interesting if Twitter disintegrates.

> But I haven’t seen anyone saying that life was better in the Roman Empire, ever.

There's an entire meme format to this effect ("R E T V R N", imitating Latin engravings.)

Damn. I am not sure I should go down this particular rabbit hole. From what I have seen it looks more or less like the “Sparta is kewl” movement, but then I am an outsider. Would you have any pointer to help me make sense of this?

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