At the start of this year, as I reached for SPQR, Mary Beard’s magnificent history of ancient Rome, I felt some trepidation, and not only because the internet has shot my ability to read books straight to dopamine-addled, monosyllabic hell.
No, my main concern was because of something I read back in 2023, when some news organisations that really ought to know better but need to woo the under-25s reported a curious phenomenon first revealed by an Instagram celebrity and then amplified on TikTok: namely, that men spend an inordinately large amount of time thinking about the Roman Empire.
If I started reading SPQR, I now asked myself, what other clichés of modern masculinity would follow? Was I days away from starting a podcast? Investing in crypto? Scooping my critical faculties out of my nose and laying them on the altar of Joe Rogan?
The answer is that none of those things have happened, probably because I didn’t get past the first chapter.
Even the Romans’ famous paganism has started feeling entirely modern.
It wasn’t that the book was unreadable — it is excellent — but I must confess that, as someone saturated with the sleaze of current politics, I was depressed by how familiar everything seemed.
Instead of taking me on a journey to that other country that is the past, I felt as if I’d opened today’s newspapers, crammed with political charlatans, egoists and cutthroats, all pulling and pushing fickle or traumatised voters this way or that for personal gain. Lucius Catiline's plot to seize Rome and wreck it to clear his debts might have been hatched in 63 BC, but in 2025 you can point to any number of places, from Mar-A-Lago to Nkandla, and find men who would plunge their countries into chaos or even bloodshed to avoid jailtime.
Even the Romans’ famous paganism has started feeling entirely modern: over the years that I’ve followed the rise of the evangelical right, I’ve discovered that it worships a dizzying variety of gods, from a loving, confiding friend who’s a bit like Venus and wise counsellor (Minerva) to a stern and vengeful father (Jupiter) and a kragdadige bully who wants to put their enemies to the sword (Mars). There’s even one who controls the weather just like Neptune: over the weekend I read posts by South African evangelicals explaining that the Los Angeles fires are divine punishment. (I can’t tell you why hurricanes in Florida aren’t controlled by the same god, but I suppose he doesn’t want to meddle in the jurisdiction of evangelicals’ supreme deity, Donald the god of cognitive dissonance.)
The most immediate parallel, however, is that of the P in the ‘SPQR’ Beard chose as her title: populus; the people; the masses who, no matter your wealth or power, you must have on your side so that they back your claim and howl down your critics.
Which brings us to the two men now controlling the moods and therefore the minds of infinitely more human beings than any Roman emperor could have dreamed possible: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
It is natural that most of the heat and noise has been around Musk, whose transformation into an apologist for neo-fascism has transfixed and appalled liberals and the media that serves them. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was branded as a dull android years ago, and, despite a brief media frenzy around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, was left to potter around his empire largely in peace.
Last week, however, Zuckerberg wrested back some of the limelight, telling Pravda, sorry, Joe Rogan that there had been “too much censorship” on Facebook, largely from fact-checkers who were “too politically biased”, and that as a result, fact-checking would now be replaced by users flagging misinformation themselves.
Of course, Rogan’s job is to help shape the new federation of conformist know-nothings, not to question oligarchs, so Zuckerberg wasn’t asked whether, for example, Meta had ever gone through a formal process of codifying for itself what political bias looks like, and when and how it had determined that some fact-checkers were falling foul of these codified red lines, and why, instead of replacing these people with fact-checkers who could be trained to operate within Meta’s clearly outlined rules for bias, it has chosen to scrap fact-checking altogether.
No, Rogan isn’t there to do journalism, and so the only message that came through the wireless was the one the oligarchs and handmaids like Rogan need to entrench: that fact-checking is censorship; that If I say something false, and you point it out, you are oppressing me, like Stalin or Hitler.
Or maybe like neither, if the propagandists have their way.
Consider last week’s friendly chat between Musk and Alice Weidel, the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (spoiler alert: Germany has tried this alternative before and didn’t end well); a happy meeting of minds in which Weidel parroted a favourite lie of the right, namely, that because the Nazis were “national socialists”, Hitler was a communist.
Musk didn’t correct her. Zuckerberg will correct neither of them. And why would he? The whole point of waging war against expertise is to flatten everything; to create an intellectual wasteland on which anything you build, no matter how small and stupid and venal, looks like a shining city on a hill.
It’s enough to make you quote Cicero as he denounced Catiline in 63 BC: oh, what times; oh, what customs...
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