A place to meme about the glorious ROMAN EMPIRE (and Roman Republic, and Roman Kingdom)! Byzantines tolerated! The HRE is not.
RULES:
No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bigotry, etc. The past may be bigoted, but we are not.
Memes must be Rome-related, not just the title. It can be about Rome, or using Roman aesthetics, or both, but the meme itself needs to have Roman themes.
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MORE COMMS ON THE HISTORYVERSE:
Explanation: An older bit of OC from me!
Julian the Apostate was the last Pagan Emperor of Rome. He pursued a policy of religious tolerance across the Empire - which deeply upset the unified Christian Church, who had spent the past 40 years cheerfully persecuting heathens and heretics. Treating people equally is DEEPLY unfair to the TRUE faith, after all!
If the Europeans actually learned better about the Pagan→Christian takeover in Rome (or: how a persecuted group played victims until they got into power, then happily did towards others the same they were subjected to, then fought against attempts to end this vicious cycle), perhaps the world would be in a better place.
But as easy to mock the Europeans for their ignorance of their own history, humankind as a whole is like this. We never look at the past, and we're condemned to commit the same mistakes as our ancestors. We're still the same dumbarses as the Romans; no, wait, we're still the same dumbarses as the ones bashing rocks together, 200 millenniums ago.
There was no takeover of Christianity in Rome. There was a takeover of Rome in Christianity. Rome imposed creeds, hierarchies, even councils to the church before the conversion of the emperors and the official christianization of the Empire because the Empire wanted to control the new faith. After that there was an imperial church and a lot of “heresies”, which were fought by the imperial church. One of the decisions of Julian was to cancel the obligation for Christians to subscribe to the imperial christian creed, freeing in fact Christianity.
And this should be a lesson of how the State and the religions should be separated, for the good of the State and of the religions themselves. As a Christian, I prefer Julian over Constantine.
Call it "Christianity taking Rome over" or "Rome taking Christianity over", it's still the same: Christians went from a group persecuted by state-approved Pagans, to the state-approved group persecuting Pagans. The years past Constantine switched who held the stick, and who got the short end of it, but the persecution itself stayed the same.
Either way, it wasn't just the political structure, but also the population and their mindset - shared by both Christians and Pagans, as shown by the mob violence. Pagans killing George of Cappadocia, Christians killing Hypatia... or the consistent vandalism towards each others' religious buildings.
I think it's a great cautionary tale to not give a free pass to oppression, because of dumb shit like "I don't like the victim", "I like the perpetrator", or "the perpetrator used to be a victim". Because who is getting oppressed might change in the future.
And this should be a lesson of how the State and the religions should be separated, for the good of the State and of the religions themselves.
IMO this separation is essential, but not enough. You need also a strong culture of tolerance and anti-oppression.
As a Christian, I prefer Julian over Constantine.
You're saying this as a Christian living in 2025. Your mindset is completely different from those folks, as shown by the fact you just praised the separation of state and religion (and I agree with it).
Those folks back then, however? They probably hated Julian with everything they could, as some sort of "filthy traitor". Not just for being Pagan (cue to the epithet), but also because he got in the way of the oppression they wanted.
