Thinking about the Roman Empire

In the future, we may have forgotten how various social platforms spent a significant amount of time analyzing how often men think about the Roman empire, how shocked some of us have been to find out how many men think about the Roman empire daily.

And then there was the question of what kind of men:  what race, what economic class, what nationality?  In a recent episode, the NPR show 1A covered this Roman empire phenomena in a way that was intriguing, funny, and full of insight.

As to the question of how often men think about the Roman empire, over on Twitter, poet Alicia E. Stallings wrote, "Women think about the Iliad about once a day."  

I replied, "Or is it the Odyssey? I think of Penelope, weaving and unweaving, of the men making their way home, of us all, stuck in so many ways, dreaming of something else."

This idea that men think about the Roman empire once a day made me think about what we think about when we're barely conscious of thinking at all.  I thought of James Joyce, trying to capture the elusive nature of our internal monologue, how mundane those monologues can be, how they point us to what we really value.