In 2022, a Swedish influencer told her followers on Instagram to ask the men in their lives about the Roman Empire. Her instinct was that men, for some reason, have plenty of thoughts about the ancient civilization. She turned out to be correct.

The suggestion led to a proliferation of videos on social media of women asking men how often they think about the Roman Empire. For some men, it was daily. For others, weekly.

(This is the part where I admit that as a teenager I got a large SPQR henna tattoo on my forearm, although technically those are the initials of the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire, and with that distinction, I am probably already telling on myself.)

In any case, a meme was born. What began as a question of how often men think about the Roman Empire, morphed into the idea that any topic that occupies an inordinate amount of one’s mental space is one’s own personal Roman Empire.

For example, someone might say their Roman Empire is 2003-era pop culture or The Titanic. You can quickly fall down a Reddit rabbit hole where people share obsessions as wide ranging as women’s bible studies groups and Chicago’s alleyways.

Now that I’ve got all of the Boomers who listen to this podcast up to speed (hi, dad), you have the context for today’s episode, which is “Roman Empire elections.” Not elections that happened in the Roman Empire (which, again, wouldn’t be possible because the start of the empire marked the end of representative government), but instead American elections that take up an inordinate amount of our mental space.

Dear friends of the podcast Leah Askarinam, Jacob Rubashkin and I came up with this idea while we were recording a different podcast a while back, so this week we are actually indulging. Part 2 will publish Tuesday, December 23rd for paid subscribers.

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