Sex on the brain? No, men are most likely thinking about the Romans

TikTok is on fire with posts from women asking their men how often they think about Caesars, empire and all things SPQR. Believe me, it’s a lot, confesses Boris Starling

Romans on the brain: Re-enactors from the Roman Deva Victrix 20th Legion celebrate the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia in Chester (Getty Images)

How often do men think about the Roman empire? That’s the question currently setting TikTok alight. Taking inspiration from an Instagram reel posted last month by Swedish gamer Arthur Hulu, who styles himself Gaius Flavius, women are uploading videos of themselves asking their partners exactly this – and gobsmacked when the answers come back. Once a day isn’t unusual. Once a week seems a bare minimum. Frequent male thoughts about sex, beer or football, sure: but the Roman empire? Women have no idea.

A quick look at my bookshelves suggests I am ahead of the TikTok curve. There’s Robert Graves’s I, Claudius; all three volumes of Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy; The Trigan Empire (Seventies space opera meets ancient Rome); every Asterix book (”The year is 50BC. Gaul is entirely occupied by the Romans. Well, not entirely…”); and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Every drive in Italy proves to me that Ben-Hur is a documentary. One of those drives was a six-hour round trip to Lake Trasimene while on holiday, because I wanted to see where Hannibal’s men had massacred Gaius Flaminius’s army during the Second Punic War in 217BC. No one else was mad enough to submit themselves to a long trip in sledgehammer heat without aircon, so I went alone. That’s the kind of draw the Roman empire has. And even driving here in England provides plenty of reminders: many new builds look like they won’t last a couple of decades, let alone the couple of millennia they could expect with superior Roman concrete.