This is their #RomanEmpire: Toxic Masculinity, Far-Right Propaganda and Social Media Trends Under the Lens of Classical Reception Studies

Abstract

During the last few years, classicists and ancient historians have started to analyse critically far-right's digital receptions of the classical past. The appropriations of ancient Greece and Roman history to promote patriarchal and white supremacist ideology are not new at all, but the digital sphere have created new ways of codification of such classical receptions. Following Trump’s second victory—preceded by the global rise of the far right and the increasing influence of social networks on the sociopolitical landscape—the receptions of the Greco-Roman past in the digital sphere warrant even greater attention. In this paper, I will undertake the analysis a social media viral trend from September 2023 about ‘how often men think about the Roman Empire’. Although the trend cannot be directly explained as a far-right propaganda campaign, it was certainly linked to conservative views of Antiquity, and it encapsulates key hegemonic ideas about the Roman past that circulate within the collective imagination. I will address the link between this trend and far-right political appropriations of ancient Rome, analysing various examples of memes, reels and images and videos created with AI, to show how these digital creations are conditioning, negatively, an increasing number of users’ ‘horizons of expectation’ about the Roman past.