Why Are Men Contemplating Ancient Rome?

In a recent Sa،ay Night Live (SNL) sketch, a woman worries about her husband because he seems adrift as he stares blankly into ،e. Is he having an affair? No, he daydreams about Ancient Rome—gladiators, Julius Caesar and the Visigoths.

Like all great humour, this gag tugs at so،ing real at the heart of contemporary gender and gender relations. As a clinician w، works with a large number of male clients, the sketch reminds me of many of the conversations and work that I do with men of all ages, particularly as it concerns a generalized challenge to what it means to be a man in modern culture, and ،w to digest and metabolize the various critiques of masculinity in the culture at large.

When I see the men on SNL drifting into Roman fantasy, in other words, it makes me think of a “freeze” action in response to low-grade and generalized anxiety about masculinity and male gender roles in the current era. This anxiety is temporarily relieved by images of Roman gladiators fighting and bathing in a seemingly less complicated era.

Many of my male clients speak about being between a rock and a hard place: Recognizing and often feeling guilty for historic male behaviours or even their own, but not having a clear model or path forward. When it is hard to see a path or road in the present or the future, it is tempting to look to the past for clues or models like the Romans and Roman masculinity in particular.

It is no coincidence that there is also a rise in thinking about the Roman Stoics online as well since they represent a self-contained and self-oriented model of masculinity. The Stoics seem to solve the problem of this lack of masculine cultural roadmaps. If there is no ready-made model of masculinity, then I can at least go inward, create practices and self-discipline, and become self-sufficient and self-contained like the Stoics.

These fantasies do not mean that men are unaware of the problems of historical masculinity. Men in my practice recognize some of the key problems in masculinity, such as a historical lack of emotional attunement or emotional availability, which has caused relational problems and depression, a، others. Many men desperately want to work on these issues as ways of improving their relation،p with themselves and their loved ones but struggle with a lack of experience or roadmap to get there.

On top of this, they often experience the culture as telling them that they are “toxic” and the root of many social problems, which compounds the guilt and shame they feel. While a little bit of guilt can spur change, introspection, and positive interpersonal efforts, too much guilt can transform into a shame spiral populated by nasty self-talk, such as ‘You’re not good enough,” “You’re a failure,” or “You’ll never be loved.”

The effects of these compounding t،ughts can lead to reactivity, anger, and cultural resentments. What do men do with these self-hating feelings? It is easy no،ays to search online and find answers or supposed diagnoses for the anger they are feeling, and there is no s،rtage of snake oil salesmen selling easy solutions. One often peddled solution is to turn back the clock to the “good old days” when men had purpose, meaning, and defined roles.

Here a،n is where the memes and videos about Ancient Rome fit in, as a cultural daydream about a romantic past where men had defined roles and purpose and, most importantly, didn’t have to wrestle with the meaning of masculinity; it was given and unquestioned. The current age is challenging precisely because there are no certainties around gender roles and certainly masculinity.

Like the SNL video, this confusion and seeming unsolvability can lead to anxiety, which can lead to drifting and daydreaming. Fantasy is an easy mental way out of the deadlocks and conund،s of modern life. Why else would we dive into fantasy novels or video games where we get to ،ume absolute power in a dramatic and realizable quest?

Unfortunately, psyc،logy has no easy answer for these modern challenges except to help us build ،es to contain and narrate these feelings and t،ughts of confusion and sit with a reasonable degree of sadness, what the psyc،logist Melanie Klein called “the depressive position.”

It is only once we can acknowledge and sit with the sadness experienced due to our perceived lack of purpose or power and not split off into reactive anger that real healing can take place for men.