Hello, and welcome back to Saturday Night Social. It’s been a minute, but we’re reinstating our weekend post for random ruminations, absurd thoughts, and well-intentioned rage.
To kick us off, I’m sharing a theory that I think about every time the Roman Empire and/or Greek mythology apparate into my daily routine. (If you’re as online as I am, this is a lot.) The academics who study the Greeks are hotter than the academics who study the Romans.
It started with a book launch in 2021. I’d been living in London as a social media journalist when I asked my then-publication’s culture editor to send me to one of these exclusive-sounding events, as 1) I’d never been and 2) I just really wanted to be a person who “has a book launch to go to.” Thankfully, there was one that exact day—and he put my name on the list for the release of Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome. Huzzah.
In addition to pounding five to six glasses of (free) red wine, which inspired me to loudly yell, “hear hear!” when Beard gathered the attention of everyone in the room to raise a toast for her husband’s birthday (please don’t mock me more than I’ve mocked myself for this), the one detail that has remained with me is that the room seemed visibly divided.
The difference wasn’t subtle—it was binary. You either had people in bulky sweater vests, long-sleeved polos, or rimless glasses with the energy of someone who has strong opinions about aqueduct maintenance, or people with bold lipstick, colored tattoos, and at least one piercing (think Portland meets San Francisco). And when I recognized this difference out loud (again, I blame the booze), I learned—from a Greek scholar—that that’s the palpable (stereotypical) difference between someone who studies Ancient Rome and someone who studies Ancient Greece.
Which… is fucking hilarious. And it makes sense to me that canonically, Roman scholars are the equivalent of the resident Reddit nerd who scours r/AskHistorians and writes witty 3,000-word comments on YouTube essays in their free time. (I imagine they’re also @OnBlueSky.App.)
Greek scholars, meanwhile, I see dipping in and out of fast-paced algorithms, jumping on whatever big social media is the one to be on at any given moment, and actively going to bars and pubs to holler out pseudo-philosophies and make clever puns they’re hoping the patrons next to them will overhear. I imagine them saying, “Well, actually, Plato—” mid-Negroni. Again, these pipelines are all in my imagination.
But nevertheless, the idea of putting every Classics Scholar in one schoolyard—and noticing the differences—will never not be funny to me: Roman scholars destined to build infrastructure while Greek scholars philosophize in the agora. God knows how we’d categorize the Norse mythologists.
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