#i adore how they still have echoes of america and not just copy paste roman stuff
i saw your tag on that post about the propaganda posters from a few days ago and it got me thinking how the legion is closer to the american hagiography of ancient rome than ancient rome itself. caesar's reliance on hegel, their hangups about homosexuality, legion clothing reusing american football pads and the design being closer to 50s hollywood productions than historical counterparts, etc. forgive me if you've already written about this before, but i was curious to know your thoughts about this!
You almost read my mind here, because I was thinking about making a post about this. Well, not exactly about the Legion, but about how this period of time is more often than not reduced to a hypermasculine fantasy, and how it deeply pains me.
Of course, the Romans themselves are partly at fault for this (some of the written sources we have of them are very aligned with conservative sensibilities of today, but it may also be survivorship bias, absence of evidence is not evidence of the absence and all that), but when you see how Ancient Rome is represented in modern media there's an almost conscious and persistent effort in removing all the elements that may not be considered masculine in our time: dance, poetry, bucolic fantasies, perfumes, the lives of women and queer people in general...
Probably, even though Caesar had access to written sources about Rome, at the end of the day the iconography and mental image he had of the ancient times was heavily influenced by American culture (Arcade tells us something about this, how the Followers had gladiator movies holotapes in their archives), so he imitated Rome the same way people in the Medieval times would depict Roman emperors and senators with clothes that would make them look like Carolingian nobles. Human creativity is very easily influenced by what it knows best, consciously or not.
Overall, while almost all of human history is victim of being both dehumanized and distorted by the ideas of the present, in the case of Rome it's particularly noticeable outside academia. After all, centuries ago it was decided that Rome was the peak of "Western" civilization (what's the Renaissance if not the rebirth of Rome and Greece), and that idea has never died. Napoleon heavily took from Roman history, when fascists first looked back in search for a glorious past they reached for Rome, America has always kept Rome as a reference and ideal, and ultimately that conservative depiction of Rome skews our perspective of that period of time.
I also believe Mormonism had a huge influence in certain elements of the Legion that don't align with Roman culture, but if anything, that's another way for America to influence the social and cultural structure of the Legion.
Anyway, thank you so much for asking ♥️
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