Why Are Tech Billionaires so Obsessed with the Roman Empire?

I.

At nine, my youngest brother Andrés started drawing abs on himself every day with a sharpie. At first, I was amused. I saw it as an expression of his artistic leanings. Like how he enjoyed drawing cartoons with muscles. A cyborg warrior with a missing arm. A green fighter cat with a skull tattoo on his face. Even a shirtless trimmed-down Santa with gold teeth and a jacked Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with another skull tattoo, as if the pair left the North Pole and hung out at Miami nightclubs. He told me he wanted to be a bodybuilder. He couldn’t summon a six-pack onto his skinny frame, so he drew it on. 

If his aspirations were limited to physique, I would have worried solely about body dysmorphia. But I was troubled that along with muscles, he admired aggression and dominance. I suspected he was getting his messages about hypermasculinity from YouTube and society, and because I couldn’t block society, I tried parental controls on devices. When I was at my parents’, I deleted YouTube from every TV in the house. He reinstalled it. I put a passcode on the TVs. Somehow, he still found a way to watch videos of grown men playing Minecraft and yelling crude jokes to one another, which I knew could lead to videos that were even less appropriate for his age. 

Then one day, at age ten, and without knowing its name, Andrés drew a picture for our dad—“a place for fighters.” 

It was the Roman Colosseum.

Like symbolic creatine, Rome continues to pump males up. In August of 2023, Instagram user @gaiusflavius kicked off a contemporary #RomanEmpire trend by posting a photo of Roman ruins with the caption:

Ladies, many of you do not realise how often men think about the Roman Empire. Ask your husband/boyfriend/father/brother—you will be surprised by their answers! 

Hundreds of posts consequently rolled out on various media platforms as women took up this prompt and shared their findings. Apparently, lots of men think about the Romans on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis. When questioned why they think about the Romans, men’s responses included: marveling at Roman engineering feats like the aqueducts and architecture, admiring Roman history and philosophy for the “big life lessons,” and imagining themselves in Roman society. 

Another frequent line of response, not surprisingly, pointed to men thinking about the Romans’ glorification of male strength. In one video by @Hannakbrown, her fiancé says, “Men, I think, to our core we’re warriors. We have to be ready for battle at all times. And the Roman Empire is all about battle. It’s common sense.” 

I call these male superfans of the Roman Empire RomeBros, and while the social media trend was entertaining, there are real-life consequences to an obsession with Rome when it’s adopted by people with the power to impact governance. I’m terrified of the highly resourced RomeBros who not only admire the Romans but task themselves with continuing their legacy. Billionaire Charles Koch named his conservative think tank the Cato Institute, after the reactionary Roman philosopher. In the tech sector, billionaires with a conquering mindset have been likewise instrumental in weakening democracy, so it’s not surprising that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are also RomeBros. 

Zuckerberg has long been obsessed with the Romans, especially Augustus. In a 2018 New Yorker article, Zuckerberg comments on his admiration of the emperor, justifying his ruthlessness as means to an end: “I think Augustus is one of the most fascinating [figures]. Basically, through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace…What are the trade-offs in that?…that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things.” That Zuckerberg thinks one person can establish “world peace” reveals the degree to which he idealizes and misreads Augustus, also evident in how he’s trying to live in the model of the emperor’s life. The haircut Zuckerberg used to sport was modeled after Augustus’s. He also had a seven-foot statue of his wife built in the Roman tradition and even named his three children after Roman emperors: Maxima, August, and Aurelia. In 2024, a video boasting the release of a Meta AI version featured him in a white T-shirt, with Latin on the front, referencing a quote from a text written by Augustus: At the age of nineteen, on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. The line is the first sentence of Res Gestae Divi Augusti (The Deeds of the Divine Augustus), in which Augustus recounts his exploits but omits that he staged a civil war with help from his peers, Mark Antony and Lepidus. After Julius Caesar was assassinated, the three established the Second Triumvirate (rule of three men) and punished those who had plotted against Caesar. But Augustus couldn’t share power. He pushed out Lepidus and killed Mark Antony. Claiming his adopted father Julius Caesar was a god and he the son of a god, he was the first Roman to officially adopt divinity in his title. With his assumption of the title of Emperor, he also ended the era of the Republic, which had been built on the premise that there would never be single rulers. His ascension to the throne was the beginning of centuries of autocracy to follow. Zuckerberg’s attraction to him finds precedent in Augustus himself, who was inspired by and wanted to be like Alexander the Great, even wearing his image on a signet ring until deciding to wear one with an image of himself instead. Perhaps in a similar move, Zuckerberg has another Latin- T-shirt, which plays on the phrase, “either a Caesar or nothing,” and instead declares, “either Zuck or nothing.” 

Elon Musk is on his own mission of conquest, with Mars in his sights and political power at hand. He spent over $250 million to help Donald Trump win the election and championed him on X in order to prevent future attempts at federal regulation on his ventures and to assert political might himself. Whether he sees himself as a sci-fi hero destined to change the future or as a Roman fighter continuing the greatness of an ancient past, he always wants to be in battle. In 2023, Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a physical fight at an “epic location” in Italy after the Colosseum itself was ruled out, even going so far as to contact then-Italian Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, to coordinate. Though Zuckerberg accepted the challenge, the fight never panned out. 

Yet, since buying Twitter in 2022 and turning it into X, Musk has turned the site into a battleground of its own. He’s encouraged sexist, transphobic, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric through his own posts and through the logic of the algorithms, leading millions of users to flee the site because of its toxicity. On November 20, 2024, Musk reposted a set of images comparing Roman symbols to those of the US with his own caption: “America is New Rome.” A most liked comment under his post added: “Our colosseum is X.” 

II. 

The men in the #RomanEmpire trend who imagined themselves in Roman society were likely envisioning themselves among emperors, senators, and gladiators. But most of us would have had no place in Roman society except among the hundreds of millions exploited, plundered, and raped. At the empire’s peak, four out of five Europeans were under Roman rule. The empire existed because it created a war machine. It sustained itself by continuously taking over land and managing the conquered. Drooling over it is a hard sell for me. Why would anyone look to an ancient, patriarchal, slave-holding, and martial regime unless they feel affinity for social dominance?

Roman Empire glorification was once heavily taught in schools but now gets reinforced in more diffused ways. In the US, Greco-Roman culture serves as a symbolic understructure because of its role in Western culture. It influenced thinkers and artists in the Enlightenment, among them the Founding Fathers, who were inspired by Roman governing philosophy (i.e. separation of powers, an emphasis on liberty) and symbolism (i.e. the American bald eagle, the architecture of the US Capital Building). Since the 1960s, Latin has not been widely taught in US schools, and recent generations are less likely to read Roman texts in full, yet Roman culture continues to circulate in movies and shows, in which Romans are almost always played by white actors in spite of the fact that the Empire was heterogeneous, covering parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. A product of dominant value systems, media about Rome is continuous propaganda that glorifies white men. Even in the most recent Gladiator II film, Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal’s characters exist only to create obstacles for the white gladiatorial protagonist, played by Paul Mescal so that audiences sympathize with him and root for his triumph.

It’s not hard, then, for white men to retrofit the Romans to suit ethnonationalist agendas. Classicist scholar Donna Zuckerberg points out that “although whiteness is not a meaningful concept to apply to antiquity, that conceptual lacuna has not stopped the Alt-Right from using ancient Greece and Rome to fabricate a cohesive transhistorical ‘white’ identity and a continuity of ‘European’ or ‘Western’ civilization for themselves.” (Donna, a critic of how social media amplifies expressions of toxic masculinity, is also Mark’s sister, so I wonder what holiday dinners are like.)

Rhetoric proclaiming to preserve long-established hierarchies can slip easily into fascism. The word fascism itself comes from Roman symbolism: fasces were a bundling of rods with an axe carried by attendants of a Roman magistrate during processions to attest to and enforce his full might and power. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini adopted the fasces as his party’s symbol, but the symbol appears as part of US mythography too: it’s in the seal of the US Senate and can be seen on the wall as bronze fasces in the chambers of the House of Representatives.

As a “politics of hierarchy,” fascism’s utmost value is strength, and fascists nostalgically invoke a mythic patriarchal past for authoritarian ends, argues philosopher Jason Stanley (who is leaving the US for a faculty job in Canada because of the US’s own rising fascism): “In fascist politics, myths of a patriarchal past, threatened by encroaching liberal ideals and all they entail, function to create a sense of panic at the loss of hierarchical status, both for men and for the dominant group’s ability to protect its purity and status from foreign encroachment.” In the US, this kind of status panic seeks soothing and aid from various value systems; patriarchy finds reinforcement through sexism, as well as homophobia, transphobia, racial ideology, classism, and xenophobia. Socialization into one of these value systems can be a gateway into all of them.   

When he drew the muscly Santa and Rudolph, Andrés told me that if he worked for Santa, he’d want to be Head Elf. I found it funny but odd, because I never thought of Santa’s workshop as having managerial positions, but I now realize that at age nine, Andrés was already thinking in terms of stratification, which I understand because in most homes, media, and society at large, there are hierarchies. But he wasn’t seeing himself at the top—more as a kind of enforcer of a social order, expressing a mentality upon which fascism depends. 

III. 

I told my dad about the #RomanEmpire trend while it was unfolding, expecting him to find it disturbing too, but he didn’t respond. I’m used to my dad’s reticence, but this quietness felt especially weighty, so I pushed. Dad, do you think about the Roman Empire? After a long pause: Yes. After more prodding: At least once a month. And finally: Because of Catholicism. 

I had not considered the role the Empire played in the spread of Christianity. There’s the saying that Rome didn’t really fall—it just became a church. In his overview on the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon says organized religion became an effective way to manage a heterogeneous population: “the throne of the emperors would be established on a fixed and permanent basis, if all their subjects, embracing the Christian doctrine, should learn to suffer and to obey.” 

Despite my attempts to find out more of my dad’s thoughts on this topic, he wouldn’t say. So, I’m left surmising the effects of Catholicism on him and my Mexican family. As a working-class, brown-skinned man with indigenous features, my father has been made to feel wrong his entire life. I see how religion has helped him bear a life of pain. Prayer also offers him an outlet to feel grateful when things go well. But I wonder: To what extent has my dad’s fear-based life been activated by and managed by Catholicism? By Masculinity? Mexican culture? US Culture? The afterlives of empires are not separable.

In 2015, I had coffee with a senior scholar of American Studies on USC’s campus, where I work. I was studying the news tracing people’s reactions to the 2010 Census and the role that fear of demographic change might play in the 2016 election. 

I asked my colleague: “Has any country ever experienced the kind of demographic shift projected to occur in the US by the 2040s?” 

With a combination of mirth but also seriousness, he said: 

“Rome.”

IV. 

For the RomeBros of the tech world, what will the ends of conquest be? Their tech-imperialism constantly seeks new markets to conquer, and they benefit from politicians who allow them to thwart efforts at regulation. The 2016 election has been called the “Facebook election” for the ways in which the Trump campaign benefited from Facebook staffers and the ability of the platform’s tools to shape public opinion. The most recent US election likewise reveals the extent to which TechBros can influence politics. In a Guardian article, Carole Cadwalladr argues that the first wave of algorithmic disruption led to Trump’s first term as well as Brexit, but that we are now in a new order where the old rules don’t apply:

Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.

Seeing the radicalization of young men to the far-right, I fear that my little brother Andrés might be socialized into bro-y culture, into that power continuum that is against so many people like our family, a family that is full of people who are undocumented, poor, dark-skinned, queer, and feminist. 

It’s playing out right before me in real time. The argument that “demographics are destiny,” and the assumption that the US would become more progressive as it becomes more diverse has been challenged by this past election. In a New York Times op-ed, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom argues that it’s crucial to pay attention to online spaces, writing “Trump did not win over these minority and young voters because he figured out how to appeal to their identity. He excelled at tapping into the information ecosystems—social media, memes and the cultish language of overlapping digital communities—where minority and young voters express their identity.” Oppressive messaging can come from anywhere, but digital culture can be packaged in ways that accelerate acculturation into toxic ideas. While women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities are working endlessly to change the status quo, there’s a growing army of men and tradwives leveraging the tools of social media, weaponizing online communities, and invoking a white-washed, hypermasculine past to prevent a more equitable future.

What’s more, whether Musk and Zuckerberg continue to play visible or more clandestine roles in politics, neither is giving up a conqueror’s mindset. Their control over companies exerting power in and over nations makes them a continued threat to democracies across the world. They’ve also set precedent for others in tech to amass even greater resources. We might be in an interim period where tech leaders still compromise with or outright buy politicians, but at some point, they may no longer be beholden to elected officials. The word limit comes from the Latin word limes, the border areas of the Roman Empire. We are in a world with too many wannabe Caesars thriving on domination and ruthlessly intent on breaking down all limits. 

V. 

Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy, wrote Ralph Ellison. I have a big soft head, and I’m worried I won’t be able to find a spacious enough helmet.

It’s possible, though, to recognize and break from the forms of socialization we inherited. When I was a child, my dad would have me and my younger brother Miguel draw tightly contained spirals over and over on rule-lined paper to improve our penmanship so we could do well in school. At eight, Miguel had a hard time staying in between the lines. No amount of crying would soften my dad. He wouldn’t let Miguel leave the table until every line on the page was filled. Hours passed with my brother despairing at that table. He reminds me that I would finish the page for him when our dad wasn’t looking. My father was taught to write through spirals, and that’s the way he taught us, but my brother Miguel and I would never teach that way.

Never hugged as a child, my father found it difficult to hug us, especially my brother. When my dad would come home from his factory job, Miguel would run eagerly into the kitchen to greet him, only for my dad to bark, Is your room clean? Did you do your homework? 

The coil in my dad’s chest seems to constrict my brother now too, but he can easily hug his children and tell them he loves them. He has no trouble expressing delight at their doings. 

In the summer of 2022, my dad and I were standing behind a park fence, waiting for and watching Miguel as he played with his kids. “I’m sorry I was a bad dad,” my father told me, observing how differently Miguel parents. He wishes he had played with us. Knew us better. He’s trying with Andrés, decades younger than me and Miguel.

When Andrés spirals into anger, our father hugs him and says words he never could to us.

It’s OK, just breathe.   

VI.

Among the reasons given for the fall of the Roman Empire are internal factors such as corruption and decadence, and external ones, mainly that the Romans were overcome by barbarians, the term Romans used for any non-Romans. Barbarians were the other, those they defined themselves against, who they fought, and whose lands they took over. As the empire grew and amassed land inhabited by those others, they also came to rely on them; they had them fight in their military and incorporated them into their citizenry. But the more expansive the empire got, the harder it was to manage and to protect territories from foreign invaders. 

The US as Rome analogy is frequently invoked, either to attest to an inherited mandate for dominance, as Musk’s X post exemplifies, or as a warning of an empire in decline. A reigning question right now is what the US will do with all the “barbarians” in and outside of its borders. The US implements tons of defensive tactics to keep barbarians out: immigration quotas, border walls, surveillance, deportations. Yet, it relies on racialized others to keep the economy and armed forces running. 

In his book, Are We Rome? journalist Cullen Murphey writes, “The Roman Empire disappeared, of course, as a formal construct, but in other respects it did not entirely vanish,” pointing to how Roman religion, language, culture, customs, architecture, and law are still influential in Europe and the US today. Murphey’s comparison of Rome to the US also recognizes how both entities assimilated newcomers, creating multi-ethnic states. Assimilation is often thought of as a one-way process, rather than how it actually occurs, with arrivals assimilating aspects of a host culture and the host culture assimilating aspects of new arrivals. Culture is never static, even if some might desire for it to be so. 

When I hear concerns that western culture is being attacked, that people aren’t assimilating, my eyebrows raise in alarm. Assimilation into which values? Into which stories? 

Having now consumed a bunch of narratives about Rome, I understand how they can appeal to desires for a shared text, shared references, shared culture. Once you’re familiar with the grand narratives of the Republic and Empire, reading a book, listening to a podcast, or watching a film on Rome can be like entering an anthology of stories where familiar characters or tropes appear, but from different angles. 

The current book bans around the country are attempts to keep the cadre of shared texts small, to maintain existing hierarchies and to police boundaries around race, gender, and sexuality, at the expense of a well-informed public. Growing up, I had to seek out texts not on traditional curriculums or offered by the mainstream so that I wouldn’t hate myself or others like me, people who come from the margins, since schools and media can so often work to educate people into wanting power even by proxy. Those who want a greater diversity of texts are like “the barbarians at the gate,” as Viet Thanh Nguyen once put it, invoking the famous phrase warning of invasion and reframing it as a demand for change. 

VII.

Lately, I’ve wondered if, in reading so much about the Roman Empire and RomeBros, I’ve inevitably become a RomeHo. I’ve actually enjoyed reading about the Romans, learning about figures like the emperor Elagabalus, who confounded and angered his critics because he cross-dressed, was called empress, and favored his male lovers, one of whom was called his “husband.” Before this essay’s foray into the ancients, I knew little about the Egyptian queen Cleopatra beyond her death by asp and her portrayal by Elizabeth Taylor. Now I’m intrigued by her political maneuverings which deemed her a sorceress temptress, having beguiled first Julius Caesar and then Mark Antony into her kingdom and bed. I also now know there’s a Hollywood version of Rome—the flashy swords and calls for liberty—and the reality that Rome was a deeply hierarchical society; no matter who was in power, it was run to serve the interests of oligarchies. Yet, there were critics of the empire from within, as exemplified by Roman historian Tacitus’s assertion, “They create desolation and call it peace” referring to Rome’s presence in Britain. 

I’ll keep thinking about empires past and present, as well as how defensive masculinity radiates outwards, injuring people within and beyond physical proximity. Boosted by warrior iconography, masculinity gets marshalled to reinforce national boundaries, socioeconomic structures, and battle-mindsets in the next generations.  

The battle right now is whether we will have a shared future and who will be included in that “we.” The Bros have intuited that demographic shifts will bring their empire–a historically misogynistic, white, and never truly democratic empire–to collapse. They appear willing to fight to decide who stays in power.

So steeped in the rhetoric of Rome, my barbarian impulse wants to declare, Rome will fall! But what history shows us is that Rome continues, albeit in a different form. As the crisis plays out and people fight to create or contest new social formations, I wonder: on what side will Andrés, my father, all those men in the videos, and so many other people stand? 

Andrés’ last name, which is also mine, is Román, which literally means “from Rome.” 

But we are all children of empires.