The author distinguishes between people who casually think about Roman engineering or history and “RomeBros” who actively task themselves with continuing Rome’s legacy of conquest and dominance. While the #RomanEmpire social media trend revealed many men think about Rome frequently, the essay focuses on “highly resourced RomeBros” like Zuckerberg and Musk who have actual power to impact governance. These billionaires don’t just admire Rome—they model their lives after emperors, name children after them, wear Latin phrases about conquest, and leverage their control over digital platforms to influence elections and weaken democratic norms, making their obsession a genuine political threat.

The essay demonstrates how the same hierarchical values and warrior ethos operate fractally across different scales—from intimate family socialization to global imperial power. The author’s father teaching through harsh spiral drills and emotional distance reflects the same hierarchical thinking and stratification that young Andrés exhibits when imagining himself as “Head Elf,” which connects to broader cultural messaging through YouTube algorithms, which links to tech billionaires modeling themselves as emperors. This structure shows how imperial logics aren’t abstract political concepts but lived experiences that reproduce themselves through everyday interactions, making personal transformation (like Miguel breaking cycles of emotional distance) politically significant.

When the author’s father reveals he thinks about Rome monthly “because of Catholicism,” the essay connects religious institutional power to imperial management strategies. Edward Gibbon’s observation that organized religion became an effective way to manage heterogeneous populations—teaching subjects “to suffer and to obey”—suggests Christianity operated as empire’s continuation rather than its replacement. The author questions whether their father’s fear-based life and capacity to endure pain stems from Catholic conditioning, recognizing that “the afterlives of empires are not separable” from other systems like masculinity, Mexican culture, and US culture. This complicates simple narratives of religious comfort by examining how faith institutions can serve imperial control.

Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.

This article is classified as Advanced level. It employs sophisticated literary techniques including extended personal narrative interwoven with cultural criticism, requires familiarity with classical history and contemporary political theory, uses complex vocabulary (triumvirate, lacuna, heterogeneous, ethnonationalist), and demands readers track arguments across multiple scales and time periods simultaneously. The essay assumes knowledge of figures like Augustus, Mark Antony, and Mussolini while also requiring ability to synthesize connections between YouTube algorithms, demographic anxiety, fascist symbolism, and intergenerational trauma. The fractal structure and theoretical density make this appropriate for advanced readers comfortable with literary nonfiction that moves fluidly between personal and political registers.

This self-aware moment acknowledges the essay’s paradox: while critiquing Roman Empire obsession, the author has necessarily immersed themselves in Roman history to write the piece. The term “RomeHo” plays on “RomeBro” but distinguishes the author’s critical engagement—learning about figures like Elagabalus who “cross-dressed, was called empress, and favored his male lovers,” or Cleopatra’s political maneuverings, or historian Tacitus’s anti-imperial critique. Unlike RomeBros who glorify imperial conquest, the author engages Rome to understand how hierarchical systems operate and identifies with marginalized figures and critics within Roman history. This reflects the essay’s larger point about shared cultural texts: engagement isn’t inherently problematic, but the values one extracts and perpetuates matter enormously.

The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.

The Haitian Revolution serves as the article’s central example because it represents the most dramatic instance of enslaved people not just resisting but successfully overthrowing their oppressors to create the first free Black nation in the Americas in 1804. This “upended ideas about white superiority” in ways that forced European intellectuals and artists to confront contradictions between Romantic ideals of universal freedom and the reality of colonial exploitation. Unlike smaller rebellions, Haiti’s establishment as an independent nation demonstrated that enslaved people could organize sophisticated political and military resistance, directly challenging racist ideologies used to justify slavery. This occurred exactly during Romanticism’s peak, making the movement’s failure to engage seriously with this revolution a significant historical erasure.

By “violent distortions,” Nabugodi refers to how enslaver-created archives don’t simply omit Black perspectives but actively misrepresent them through demonizing narratives designed to justify continued enslavement. These archives “had a vested interest in perpetuating the slave system” and “threw all their rhetorical force at demonising Black people.” This means what does exist in the archive isn’t neutral or objective documentation but propaganda serving economic and political interests. The “violence” is both literal—these records document brutal exploitation—and epistemological, systematically distorting reality to naturalize racial hierarchy. This requires scholars to read archives critically, questioning not just what’s missing but how what’s present has been deliberately shaped to serve enslaver ideology.

Nabugodi engages directly with “calls to decolonise and diversify the curriculum” by arguing that simply adding diverse authors creates incomplete decolonization if canonical white authors remain unexamined. Her intervention suggests that meaningful curricular change requires dual action: recovering marginalized voices while simultaneously interrogating how established canonical works created and propagated racial ideologies that justified imperialism. This challenges superficial diversity initiatives that treat inclusion as box-checking rather than fundamental reconceptualization of what literary study does. The stakes are high because these works “become part of our national heritage” through school curricula, embedding their racial prejudices into how successive generations understand race, making this not just academic debate but intervention in ongoing ideological reproduction.

Readlite provides curated articles with comprehensive analysis including summaries, key points, vocabulary building, and practice questions across 9 different RC question types. Our Ultimate Reading Course offers 365 articles with 2,400+ questions to systematically improve your reading comprehension skills.

This article is classified as Advanced level. It requires familiarity with literary-historical scholarship conventions, assumes knowledge of Romanticism as a cultural movement and the transatlantic slave trade’s historical context, and engages complex theoretical concepts about archival methodology, curriculum politics, and ideological critique. The writing employs specialized terminology (bourgeoisie, bildungsroman, Afro-diasporic, canonical) while making sophisticated arguments about how institutional practices reproduce racial formations across generations. Nabugodi expects readers to understand both what she’s arguing and why traditional approaches are inadequate, requiring ability to follow meta-level critiques of scholarly and pedagogical practices. This makes the piece appropriate for advanced readers comfortable with academic discourse and invested in understanding how literary study intersects with contemporary social justice concerns.

This personal revelation demonstrates the article’s central argument about how historical racial prejudice embedded in canonical literature continues resonating today. By acknowledging that 18th and 19th-century racist ideas feel familiar rather than distant or foreign, Nabugodi illustrates how these ideologies haven’t been relegated to the past but remain actively circulating in contemporary culture. This autobiographical moment serves rhetorical and ethical functions: it makes the scholarly argument viscerally real by connecting historical analysis to lived experience, and it reveals the personal stakes motivating her academic intervention. The familiarity suggests these ideas were internalized through the very national heritage—including literature taught in schools—that her book critiques, creating a feedback loop where past prejudices shape present consciousness unless actively interrogated and disrupted.

The Ultimate Reading Course covers 9 RC question types: Multiple Choice, True/False, Multi-Statement T/F, Text Highlight, Fill in the Blanks, Matching, Sequencing, Error Spotting, and Short Answer. This comprehensive coverage prepares you for any reading comprehension format you might encounter.