The post is reaching for something it does not quite name, which is that Rome's durability was an institutional achievement, not a moral one, and those are different axes. What bound the empire was a portable apparatus of law, the census, municipal charters, a professional bureaucracy, and a citizenship that could be layered in degrees. The Lex Irnitana, a bronze municipal charter from Spain, shows a provincial town running on Roman legal procedure as a matter of routine. That is the real engine. Empires that only had a warrior elite and no administrative middle layer broke the moment they stopped expanding.
Were the Romans far more progressive than we give them credit for?
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There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog , critique:
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The post is reaching for something it does not quite name, which is that Rome's durability was an institutional achievement, not a moral one, and those are different axes. What bound the empire was a portable apparatus of law, the census, municipal charte
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There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog, critique:
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Collections: Nitpicking Gladiator II, Part I
This week (and next), I want to talk a bit about the recent release of Gladiator II. Now I’ve written a review of the film for Foreign Policy, which you can find here (behind the paywall). I …
acoup.blog
They have an impression that Rome was somewhere on the left-right wing linear spectrum we have in the United States and that they were most likely on the conservative side. Very much religious, patriarchal, warrior-oriented. The thing is, compared to today, majority of previous societies were that way. If we want to understand why Rome was so succesful, we need to compare it to the societies it defeated and/or assimilated. And surprisingly, we will find they were far more liberal and progressive than the rest. Rome was not humane by our standards. The more useful question is why it scaled and lasted in ways that Sparta, Athens, Gaul or Carthage did not.
Sparta should have never existed
Sparta is the easiest contrast because its political order was built on closure. Its citizen body was small, its military discipline was extreme, and the helot system was central to their society. It was the basis that let the Spartan elite live as a permanent warrior caste, elite in their own perceptions. A society organized around ruling a large, subordinated population by force can be formidable and it can make you feel like you would have had a blast... living as a Spartiate. Well, not really. Shortly after implementing this system (in historical terms) Spartans started running out of, well, Spartans. The society was very elitist, you could only lose your status and move down the hierarchy, not up. Helots would never be spartans and, even those that would help in critical emergency and exceed in battle would end up getting slaughtered due to being a risk to the status quo. What kind of incentive is that for anything? Bret's deconstruction of Spartan society is a masterpiece and it's best to just point it out here:
A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part I: Spartan School
This is Part I of a seven part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Gloss., Retrospective) comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state. Toda…
acoup.blog
In a nutshell, Spartan policies ended up reducing number of Spartiates, with no advantage in terms of military effectiveness (they lost against other Greek policies as often as they won), created no art or even military fortresses and had very little achievements in terms of innovation, even warfare related (such as siege material, fortification or naval infrastructure). The Romans mopped the floor with them in their warfare, exceeding them in battle with superior techniques, logistics and infrastructure. All of that came from having a society that values thought and diversity of skills, rather than only glorifying the warriors, such as Sparta did.
Athens is harder for modern readers because it tempts admiration first. Its civic culture was there, and so was its democracy, theater and other civilian. But the civic core was still narrow. Women were outside the political body (far more than in Rome, where they were at least able to act in the background) and mostly ignored. Metics (non-citiens) could live, work, and matter economically without entering that body politically, without having any impact. Athens could be brilliant and still keep citizenship restricted. There was a very small circle that you needed to belong to to be able to influece the city and feel part of it. In the Roman empire, however, we have plenty of emperors that descend from slaves themselves (Diocletian, for example). Inclusion is not the same thing as equality, and Rome's advantage was not equality. It was a wider capacity to make more people count as Roman over time, making people feel part of it, rather than outsiders. Social mobility, for the times, was one Rome's advantages.
Roman mobility
That is where Rome looks different. Roman belonging expanded through law, service, office, alliance, municipal status, manumission, and eventually wider citizenship grants. Rome had more institutional ways of binding outsiders to the system by giving them some stake in it. That mattered. A polity that can turn allies, provincial elites, auxiliaries, and freed people into some recognizable form of insiders has an easier time turning expansion into continuity.
The Roman Empire is often used by right wing advocates (originally, even Mussolini) to justify fascistic tendencies. Yes, if we compare to modern societies, Roman mindset was very conservative and war-oriented. However, that was common everywhere. Rome won over most of these other states and incorporated them effectively into their empire because they were able to see above and create inclusive institutions that offered ways for them to become Romans. It welcomed diversity (for the time) much more and benefited from it. Benefited from auxiliary forces providing Cavalry support, archers... Benefited from getting ideas from other societies and improving upon them (the Gladius, the Spatha, the Trireme...). Rome never shied away from recognizing better ways of doing things in their enemies and just taking them. Even for gods, they recognized foreign gods are gods that deserve worship just as much and assumed that, often, they were the same gods perceived differently (in this, the greeks did that too to be fair)
In general, the more you learn about greek polis and other ancient societies the more contrast you see with Rome and the more you see that what made Rome great was NOT the warrior-culture, nearly-fascist attributes we see often represented in Media, but rather the opposite. The ability to learn, incorporate different cultures into their empire and the presence of powerful, inclusive institutions that allowed foreigners to become fully Roman..
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The Diocletian line got me, an emperor descended from a freedman. That is the only example I have ever heard though. Was slave-to-the-top genuinely a path people could climb, or more the rare exception that gets repeated because it makes a good story? Genuinely asking, you clearly know more about this than I do.
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Hot take: half the people annoyed by this post are annoyed because "Rome was good at HR" is a much worse poster than "Rome was a war machine." The history is correct, it is just terrible for merch. You cannot sell a hoodie that says municipal charters and auxiliary integration.
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Let me grant the strongest version of the post first. Rome's openness to making outsiders into insiders genuinely was rare, and an ancient person choosing where to be born, not knowing their station, might rationally prefer Rome to Sparta or Carthage because the floor was less brutal and the ceiling less sealed. That is a real point. But behind the veil you also do not know if you will be born enslaved, and in Rome that was a coin flip in many regions. A system that is better for whoever ends up a provincial elite and catastrophic for whoever ends up on a Sicilian estate is not progressive, it is just better-sorted. Inclusion that you can be enslaved out of is not the same kind of good as inclusion you cannot be removed from.
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The citizenship point is real but the popular version flattens it. Diocletian's origins are murky in the sources. The Epitome de Caesaribus and the Historia Augusta call him low-born, possibly the son of a freedman, but both are late and unreliable for exactly this kind of rags-to-purple detail. The harder evidence is the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212, where Caracalla extends citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire. Cassius Dio, who lived through it, says flatly the motive was to widen the tax base, since citizens paid inheritance and manumission taxes. So yes, Rome scaled citizenship like nobody else. It just did not do it for the reasons a modern reader wants it to have done it.
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The whole post turns on the word "progressive" and it never gets defined, so it ends up doing two jobs at once. Job one: Rome was relatively more open than its neighbors on citizenship and assimilation. Job two: Rome was moving toward something we would recognize as moral progress. The first is a comparative claim about institutions and it looks defensible. The second is a directional claim about values and there is no evidence Rome thought it was heading anywhere. Manumission and citizenship grants were tools for stability and tax rolls, not steps on a road to liberty. Pick one meaning and the thread gets a lot clearer.
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Reading the "what made Rome great was the opposite of warrior culture" line, I lean toward agreeing, but I don't think the appeal people actually feel is the institutions either. It is the underdog-to-empire arc, the absorb-everything-and-win story. Could be wrong, that just seems like the thing that hooks people way before any politics shows up.
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The post is reaching for something it does not quite name, which is that Rome's durability was an institutional achievement, not a moral one, and those are different axes. What bound the empire was a portable apparatus of law, the census, municipal charters, a professional bureaucracy, and a citizenship that could be layered in degrees. The Lex Irnitana, a bronze municipal charter from Spain, shows a provincial town running on Roman legal procedure as a matter of routine. That is the real engine. Empires that only had a warrior elite and no administrative middle layer broke the moment they stopped expanding.
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The gym bros cosplaying as centurions would have been the guys hauling rocks for an actual centurion who could read three languages and do logistics math. "Rome was a hyper-masculine warrior state" is a cope invented by men who have never filed a tax return, applied to a civilization that basically invented filing the tax return. The post is right. The roads beat the abs every single time.
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What fascinates me is not whether Rome was progressive but why this is the argument we are having in 2026. The "thinking about the Roman empire" meme and its inverse, the "actually Rome was inclusive" correction, are the same gesture from opposite ends. Both treat Rome as a mirror you hold up to confirm what you already believe a good society looks like. The right wants a warrior aesthetic, the educated center wants a tolerant cosmopolis with good roads. Rome obliges both because it is dead and cannot object. The interesting question is what hunger makes a defunct empire the screen onto which a secular age keeps projecting its political theology.
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Building on the "values thought and diversity of skills" line, the philosophical evidence backs the post. The two most quoted Roman moralists are Marcus Aurelius, an emperor, and Epictetus, a former slave, and Stoicism was the closest thing the elite had to a shared ethic. Seneca's letter 47 to Lucilius literally argues that the enslaved are human beings who share the same nature and deserve respect. It did not abolish anything, but a warrior-purity culture does not produce its most admired thinker out of its own slave quarter. The center of gravity was self-mastery and reason, not the battlefield swagger the movies sell.
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