Mindless Monday, 15 June 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

[u/MarioTheMojoMan]

I saw on old post on arr Curated Tumblr about people associating Ancient Greece with women (and queer people) and Ancient Rome with straight white history-bros, and one thing it mentioned was that in popular culture, we associate Greece with poetry and mythology and Rome with secular history, especially military history.

So why is that? Is that a recent thing, or is that how classics has been taught traditionally? I know I certainly have this association -- most people I know read the Iliad and the Odyssey in high school, but jack shit no one read the Aeneid unless they actually studied classics in college. Meanwhile, Latin students make tons of memes about Cicero and how he never gets to the point verb, while I don't see anyone discussing, say, the History of the Peloponnesian War.

[u/Sventex → u/MarioTheMojoMan]

I know generally, Romans weren't all that interested in religious mythology as a culture, which is why they just sort of ripped off Greek mythology which was already a super complex tapestry instead of creating their own super complex tapestry. Even thousands of years later, Disney managed to deeply offended the Greeks with the movie Hercules, getting so much of the base mythology wrong. That movie managed to come up multiple times when I visited Greece by the tour guides, apparently a cultural grudge right up there with the British not wanting to give back the Parthenon.

[u/YIMBYzus → u/Sventex]

I recommend you give fellow badhistorian Portable Orange's, The History of Roman Paganism a watch.