Yes, yes, I'm about four months late to this trend and you'll need to excuse me as I don't lurk about on TikTok. But just as the Roman General Fabius clenched victory in the Punic Wars against Carthage by constantly biding for time, perhaps this blog post can also benefit from a bit of added time and hindsight.

If you're a geriatric old fart like me, you might not have heard about this as well - but apparently girlfriends/wives around the world were finding out in the last months that their partners think about the Roman Empire a lot more frequently than they would have otherwise guessed.

Here’s a short compilation of some more viral clips that emerged on TikTok:

I've got to admit, even as an ardent consumer of the classic works in my university days, I don't think about the Romans anywhere as much as the guys in some of the clips do. But it really is not hard to see why, or how it keeps reappearing in our thoughts.

I mean, for all the motorists here, there's even a proverb that goes "All roads lead to Rome", which, apparently is even applies even to the way the minds of men everywhere are wired.

And of course, seeing the influence of the Romans everywhere comes as just one of the repercussions of living in a society that has been touched by the Western World. You would have seen Roman numerals if you're even remotely into the Super Bowl. And the manner in which our democratic governments are organised is a product of the organisation of the early Roman Republic.

Apparently this scenario has been playing out in bedrooms everywhere but we just never knew it

I think many of you will remember all the talk that emerged around the formation of an 'Auto Czar' in the U.S.A, a task force that would deal with the financial bailout of Chrysler and General Motors in 2009. The term czar, of course, traces its origins to the Roman title Cesear.

There's clearly something very interesting about how differently men and women operate being revealed here, you know, like as if some of us are from Mars and the rest are from Venus.

But I want to ride on this trend and point out something else altogether.

Even the greatest empires can fall, and it would be wise if we looked back once in a while to avoid their mistakes

I get that it isn't fun to read bad news, but my take is that the world is slowly becoming a more dangerous place. The political fault lines that have emerged in recent years (think about Russia's attempt to annex Ukraine, and the perpetuation of the Palestine-Isreali conflict) seem to suggest that Huntington vision of a world increasingly split along cultural divides was right all along.

The U.S.A is dealing with increasing political polarisation and instability, and even locally, our leaders can no longer be assumed to be above corruptibility.

The Romans too were famously distracted from the political decay that was happening in their era by bread and circuses, and I can't help but feel like YouTube and TikTok are essentially the same sources of superficial appeasement of our own time. Hopefully future generations won't be surprised to find that their husbands constantly think about the collapse of Western democracy.

Perhaps the pessimist in me is just becoming more vocal here. But let's not get too absorbed in the next TikTok trend so that we get distracted from staying informed with what's going on in the world around us.

And maybe in the future I'll have a better shot at riding on the next viral trend.

- Clarence

Images courtesy of Reddit and Imgflip