this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Rough Roman Memes

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A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.

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  1. No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, etc. The past may be bigoted, but we are not.

  2. Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.

  3. Follow Lemmy.world rules.

Not sure where to start on Roman history?

A quick memetic primer on Republican Rome

A quick memetic primer on Imperial Rome

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I would kill to live in such peaceful times! (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Yeah, Tiberius is the guy who didn't want to be emperor, fucked off to a remote island and let his BFF Sejanus run the empire for him (and fuck things up for centuries to come). Like, he was there. He was emperor, at some point. Nobody noticed, and there are countless other emperors who had a bigger (for better or for worse) impact on the principate. Christianity was born during his reign and he almost certainly didn't even notice. But the empire was a bit more peaceful under him, and he didn't squander the treasury like many other emperors, so he wasn't the worse?

I can't say he was a good emperor, because he really wasn't. But I also can't bring myself to hate him, and I do have some sympathy for how his life unfolded โ€” mostly ignored by his father, eventually chosen for succession as a last resort after everyone else had already died, forced to terminate a happy marriage for political reasons, and lost every person dear to him, including his wife, his brother and his sons. He was, at some point, one of the most powerful and influential individuals of his lifetime, but he had no control over his own life.