At some point in 2023, the number of views of the hashtag Roman Empire on TikTok passed

a billion.

This social media craze originated when girlfriends began asking their boyfriends how often

they thought about the Roman Empire.

The typical answer was supposedly every day. Are we Rome? American historians and

public intellectuals may not ask this question every day, but they ask it quite frequently.

In 2007, Cullen Murphy published a book with that title. He revisited the subject in April

2021, drawing breathless parallels

between the scenes at the Capitol the previous January 6th and the sack of Rome. Outside,

Murphy wrote, a pandemic raged, recalling the waves of plague that periodically swept across the

Roman Empire. This kind of historical hyperventilation has been a recurrent feature

of the Trump era. Writing for time in December 2018, Edward Watts asserted that the most significant

danger old republics like ours face is not the sudden assault of an aspiring autocrat, but the

slow erosion of their cultural and institutional

defences. Tim Elliott drew an even more direct connection in his November 2020 essay for Politico,

in which he compared Donald Trump to Julius Caesar. Elliot argued that the American Republic

must be on its last legs because Trump, like Caesar, promises

to return us to an imagined ancient glory while bulldozing democratic norms, ignoring checks

on his power, and eroding political debate. Of course, all these authors neglect to mention

the ways in which Trump is not like a Roman emperor. For example, the president

is preoccupied with reducing the size of government, not something autocrats are known for,

and reducing the regulations on business. He is for free speech and against censorship. He's

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