The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist

Despite the fact that I am currently twenty-two years old, I do not have an account on TikTok and I have no intention to create one. It often feels like I’m the only person my age who doesn’t have one, but I don’t mind because I’ve never really been one to follow the crowd. I have, however, over the past week or so, encountered a large number of classicists and ancient historians online discussing a conspiracy theorist named Donna Dickens who uses the TikTok handle “momllennial_” who is apparently attracting an enormous amount of attention on that platform by making absolutely ridiculous claims about ancient history. Their most recent such claim is that the ancient Romans never existed and they were totally invented as “a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination.”

Right now, all the historians, classicists, and archaeologists who are on TikTok seem to be busy debunking Dickens’s claims. I, however, am not going to try to debunk their claims, because other people are already doing it and, frankly, anyone who knows anything at all about Roman history and literature, the Latin language, archaeology, scientific dating methods, or historical methods in general can easily spot the patent ridiculousness of the things they are claiming.

Instead, I want to do something very different from what I have seen anyone else doing; I want to talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome didn’t exist. Believe it or not, Dickens is not the first person to promote these assertions. In fact, they are actually peddling a conspiracy theory that originated with a reactionary Catholic Jesuit in the seventeenth century CE.

The background of Renaissance humanism

Before I talk about the history of the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome never existed, I feel I should describe the specific historical context that first made this theory seem plausible to someone, because I think that this context is extremely important to understanding how and why the theory emerged.

Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, thousands of scribes meticulously copied ancient Greek and Roman texts by hand. As the New Zealand-based classicist Peter Gainsford discusses in this blog post he wrote in April 2018, these scribes were, by any large, honest and dedicated to their work and there were rigorous procedures in place to ensure the accurate transmission of texts.

Nonetheless, in spite of their best efforts, scribes often made mistakes while copying. Many of these mistakes are fairly obvious. For instance, often a scribe would accidentally copy the same letter, the same word, or the same line twice or a scribe would accidentally leave out a letter, a word, or a line. Occasionally, a well-intentioned scribe incorrectly came to believe that the text they were copying was corrupt and therefore sought to correct the text to what they thought it originally said, thereby inadvertently introducing changes to the text.

ABOVE: Illustration depicting Peter Lombard, the bishop of Paris, as a scribe, from the Lilly Library, Ricketts 20, fol. 1v, dating to between c. 1200 and c. 1215 CE

Scholars in antiquity and the Middle Ages sometimes compared multiple copies of the same text to try to correct these sorts of corruptions and determine what the text originally said. Then, in Italy in the fourteenth century CE, the movement of Renaissance humanism began to take hold. The Renaissance humanists were mostly Latin philologists who absolutely idolized the ancient Romans. They wanted to study as many authentic ancient Roman texts written in what they considered the highest quality of Classical Latin as possible, so that they could write better Latin themselves.

As a result of this, a major initiative of the Italian Renaissance from the beginning was to collect and study ancient Roman texts written in Latin. The Renaissance humanists, however, swiftly found that many of the texts they wanted to study contained serious corruptions. The poems of the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus (lived c. 84 – c. 54 BCE), for instance, were notoriously only preserved through a single manuscript that was absolutely riddled with corruptions and copying mistakes.

The Italian humanists therefore dedicated themselves to textual criticism, seeking to determine as accurately as possible what the texts originally said. They did this by, among other things, closely examining the language of the texts themselves and comparing different manuscripts of the same text to observe the differences and similarities between them. The Italian humanist scholars Francesco Petrarca (lived 1304 – 1374) and Poggio Bracciolini (lived 1380 – 1459) became particularly famous for going out and finding manuscript copies of ancient Latin texts in monastic libraries and producing critical editions of them.

ABOVE: Portrait of Francesco Petrarca (left) and Poggio Bracciolini (right), who are among the most famous humanist philologists of the Italian Renaissance

Lorenzo Valla and the disproving of the Donatio Constantini

The Renaissance humanists also devoted themselves to the task of detecting which texts that claimed to be ancient were actually medieval forgeries. The most notorious such forgery is a text written in Latin known as the Donatio Constantini, or the Donation of Constantine. In reality, this text was probably composed in around the eighth century CE, but it claims to be an authentic decree of the emperor Constantine I (ruled 306 – 337 CE).

The Donatio Constantini claims that Pope Sylvester I miraculously healed Constantine of leprosy and that Constantine, in gratitude, transferred supreme authority over the city of Rome and the entire western half of the Roman Empire to the bishop of Rome in perpetuity.

In the High and Late Middle Ages, various popes used this document to claim that they had supreme political authority granted to them by Constantine I himself. As early as around 1001 CE, the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III may have hinted that he believed that the Donatio Constantini was a forgery (Monumenta Germaniae Historica DD II 820, pages 13–15), but the document was generally accepted as authentic until the fifteenth century, when the flowering of Renaissance humanism brought its authenticity into question.

ABOVE: Fresco from the San Silvestro Chapel in the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome, painted in 1247 CE, depicting Constantine I donating the western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I, as described in the Donatio Constantini

Multiple Renaissance humanist scholars denounced the Donatio Constantini as a forgery on philological grounds, but the most famous critic of the document was the brilliant Italian humanist scholar and Roman Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla (lived c. 1407 – 1457). In around the year 1440, Lorenzo wrote an essay in Latin titled De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione Declamatio, in which he presents a definitive argument based on philological and historical evidence that the Donatio Constantini is, in fact, a complete forgery and not at all an authentic ancient Roman text.

Lorenzo’s essay disproving the authenticity of the Donatio Constantini circulated informally during his own lifetime, but it was not was formally published until 1517, the same year when Martin Luther, a professor of moral theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany, published his famous Ninety-Five Theses, an event which is now traditionally considered to mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Unsurprisingly, Lorenzo’s paper became especially popular and influential among Protestants.

Lorenzo’s argument, however, was so compelling that even Catholics came to accept that the Donatio Constantini was not truly ancient. The final nail in the coffin for the document’s authenticity came when the Catholic cardinal and church historian Caesar Baronius acknowledged it as a forgery in his Annales Ecclesiastici, which was published in twelve volumes from 1588 to 1607.

Lorenzo’s proving of the Donatio Constantini as a medieval forgery helped to usher in an era of much greater skepticism toward the authenticity of purported ancient Greek and Roman texts. This sometimes veered into hyper-skepticism and a tendency for philologists to reject the authenticity of texts solely because they deemed the texts to be of inferior literary quality.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Italian humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla, who proved in his paper De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione Declamatio that the Donatio Constantini was a forgery

Jean Hardouin: original inventor of the conspiracy theory

It was in this environment of increased skepticism and religious factionalism that the conspiracy theory that ancient Rome did not even exist first began to take shape. The earliest person who is known to have seriously advanced the claim that the vast majority of ancient Greek and Roman texts are fake was the French Jesuit and antiquarian Jean Hardouin (lived 1646 – 1729). This is highly ironic, for reasons that will soon become quite transparent.

Hardouin was extremely passionate about the Latin language, Latin philology, and Latin literature. Over time, however, while studying ancient Roman texts written in Classical Latin, he noticed that many of these texts included Latin forms, words, usages, phrases, and constructions that he regarded as aberrant, wrong, and unworthy of genuine Roman literature, along with many passages that he thought didn’t make logical sense.

As he was doing this, he was also studying ancient coins. He found that the writings of Roman historians like Publius Cornelius Tacitus (lived c. 56 – c. 120 CE) and Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (lived c. 69 – after c. 122 CE) contained mentions of historical events that he thought should have been commemorated with coins that were simply not attested in the numismatic evidence.

It also so happens that Hardouin was a die-hard traditionalist Roman Catholic who strongly opposed the Protestant Reformation. While studying the writings of the early Christian church fathers, he was shocked and disgusted to find many passages that supported theological positions that he regarded as utterly heretical and deplorable. He maintained that ancient Christians were all thoroughly theologically orthodox and could not have possibly truly written these heinous works.

ABOVE: Portrait of the French Jesuit and philologist Jean Hardouin, who is the earliest person known to have claimed that nearly all ancient texts are forgeries

In the year 1696, Hardouin published a very strange monograph titled Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Restitutae, or Chronologies Restored from Ancient Coins, in which he claims that the vast majority of supposed ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian texts are, in fact, complete forgeries and that many supposed events in ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian history never really happened. In 1729, Hardouin published a shorter work titled Prolegomena ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum, in which he further expounds this conspiracy theory.

Hardouin maintains that the Iliad, the Odyssey, Herodotos’s Histories, the comedies of Plautus, the writings of Cicero, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, Vergil’s Georgics, and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History are the only “pagan” texts that are truly ancient. He insists that all the other ancient “pagan” writings are medieval forgeries, along with nearly all the writings of the Christian church fathers.

Hardouin maintains that an impia factio, or “impious faction,” of Benedictine monks who opposed the true teachings of the Roman Catholic Church deliberately forged the vast majority of ancient texts, as well as references to those texts in later texts, in the thirteenth century CE as part of an elaborate plot to undermine the true teachings and supreme authority of the church and promote deplorable heresies in its place.

He claims that this malevolent faction worked under the orders of a mysterious figure whom he calls “Severus Archontius.” This seems to be a code name for Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire (lived 1194 – 1250 CE), who was a notorious recurring bogeyman for late medieval and early modern Catholics because he had a reputation in his own lifetime for religious unorthodoxy, he frequently warred with the papacy, and he was ruthlessly vilified by pro-papal chroniclers for centuries as an atheist.

ABOVE: Illustration of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the “Manfred Manuscript” of his treatise De Arte Venandi cum Avibus (Biblioteca Vaticana Pal. lat 1071)

Hardouin also turns his attention to address the Bible itself. You see, the Vulgate is a translation of the Biblical writings from the original Hebrew and Koine Greek into Classical Latin. It was made in the late fourth century CE by the church father Jerome of Stridon and became the most widely used Latin translation of the Bible in western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. At the time when Hardouin was alive, Protestants were making translations of the Bible from the original languages into vernacular languages and attacking the Vulgate as containing inaccuracies.

Hardouin therefore seeks to defend Catholicism by unusually insisting that Jesus and his followers actually spoke Latin, not Aramaic, and that the Vulgate New Testament is, in fact, not a translation, but rather the original text of the New Testament, containing the infallible words of the Jesus and the apostles in the original language. He also insists that the writings of the New Testament in Koine Greek are not the original New Testament texts at all, but rather inaccurate and heretical translations.

Scholars of Hardouin’s own time initially tried to refute his crackpot theories respectfully, but, over time, as he refused to listen to their arguments, he gradually became seen as a pariah. Nonetheless, his work became the basis for many later conspiracy theories about classical literature.

ABOVE: Imaginative portrayal of Jerome, the translator of the Latin Vulgate, painted in c. 1480 by Domenico Ghirlandaio

Edwin Johnson: atheist appropriation of Hardouin’s conspiracy theories

Although Jean Hardouin was a traditionalist Catholic, his conspiracy theory about nearly all ancient texts being fake was later appropriated by the English radical atheist writer Edwin Johnson (lived 1842 – 1901), who first started out along the path of denying history by promoting the Christ myth theory. In 1887, Johnson published an anonymous book titled Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins, in which he asserts that neither Jesus himself nor any of the apostles ever existed and that Christianity did not emerge until the time of the Antonine Dynasty in the second century CE, about a century later than it really did.

At some point, Johnson became an avid reader and admirer of Jean Hardouin’s works. Naturally, he took Hardouin’s claims much further than even Hardouin himself had gone. Hardouin only argued that most supposed ancient Greek, Roman, and early Christian texts were forgeries and that many events in Greek, Roman, and early Christian history never really happened. Johnson, by contrast, was possibly the earliest person to argue that an entire period of recorded human history was totally fabricated.

In his book The Rise of Christendom (published in 1890) and his book The Pauline Epistles: Re-Studied and Explained (published in 1894), Johnson claims that Jesus, the apostles, early Christianity, the church fathers, the church councils, and the entire period of human history spanning the years from late antiquity to the thirteenth century CE—roughly seven hundred years of history, making up the vast majority of the Middle Ages—never really happened.

Instead, Johnson insists that Christianity actually emerged in the thirteenth century CE and a vast conspiracy of monks (mostly those of the Benedictine order) somehow secretly and deliberately fabricated all the surviving Christian texts, artifacts, and monuments from before that time, as well as all the surviving ancient Greek and Roman texts that mention Christianity, in the period that mainstream historians know as the Late Middle Ages.

Johnson also wrote a book titled The Rise of English Culture, which was published in 1904, after his death. In this book, he goes even further, essentially claiming that all of English history before the fifteenth century CE never really happened and it was all somehow secretly forged by the Benedictine conspiracy. He also produced a translation of Jean Hardouin’s Prolegomena ad Censuram Veterum Scriptorum into English. This translation was published in 1909, nearly a decade after Johnson’s death.

Robert Baldauf: denying the existence of Greece and Rome

Possibly the first person to outright claim that ancient Greece and Rome never existed at all was the obscure Swiss writer Robert Baldauf, a contemporary of Edwin Johnson, about whom almost nothing reliable is known. In 1902 and 1903 respectively, Baldauf published volumes one and four of an intended four-volume work in German titled Historie und Kritik.

In these volumes, Baldauf observes similarities among classical Greek and Roman texts written by different authors and later medieval and Renaissance texts. Mainstream scholars and historians are generally able to explain these similarities quite easily. They hold (almost certainly correctly) that Greek and Roman authors drew on common literary tropes and traditions and that ancient Greek and Roman literature influenced later medieval and Renaissance literature.

Baldauf, however, claims that neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans ever existed, that the Early Middle Ages never happened, and that all surviving works of ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian, and early medieval literature were totally fabricated by Italian humanists during the Renaissance as part of an elaborate conspiracy.

He asserts that the reason why classical texts by different authors have similarities is not because the authors were drawing on the same literary tropes and traditions, but because the texts were actually written by the same members of a secret humanist forgery cabal. Similarly, he concludes that the reason why medieval and Renaissance texts are similar to ancient Greek and Roman texts is not because medieval and Renaissance authors were deliberately imitating the earlier classics, but rather because they were actually the same people who wrote those classics in the first place.

Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov

The next most influential proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient Greece and Rome never existed was the Russian communist revolutionary and polymath Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov (lived 1854 – 1946), who, despite being seemingly unaware of Hardouin, Johnson, and Baldauf’s writings, took the conspiracy theory further than any of them.

Between 1924 and 1932, Morozov published a work in seven volumes, originally titled The History of Human Culture from the Natural Scientific Point of View and later retitled simply Christ. In this work, Morozov propounds the thesis that all of human history before the sixteenth century CE never happened, or at least not as it is described by mainstream historians.

A central plank of Morozov’s method is the assumption that, if two events he perceives as similar are recorded to have happened at different times in different places, then they must actually be the same event, merely incorrectly transposed into different historical time periods under a false chronology. Thus, Morozov argues that nothing is known about human history before around 1000 CE and that all the events in ancient and medieval history that really happened actually happened in the brief span of about five hundred years from around 1000 CE to the sixteenth century CE.

ABOVE: Portrait photograph taken in the 1880s of the Russian communist revolutionary and conspiracy theorist Nikolai Alexandrovich Morozov

Introducing Anatoly T. Fomenko, mathematician and conspiracy theorist

This brings us to Anatoly T. Fomenko, the most famous contemporary proponent of the conspiracy theory that ancient and medieval history never happened. Fomenko was born in the Soviet Union in 1945 and earned a PhD in mathematics in 1972. He subsequently established himself as a respectable mathematician, becoming a professor of mathematics at Moscow State University and a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

To give credit where credit is due, Fomenko is genuinely a quite talented man. As I understand it, he has actually done some fairly impressive work in mathematics. He is also an artist and I have to admit that his art is actually pretty good. Unfortunately, Fomenko, like so many scientists and mathematicians before him, hubristically assumed that his training in mathematics somehow made him an expert in history.

He therefore turned his attention to world history, despite clearly having no understanding of history or historical methods, and came up with an absolutely bizarre, off-the-rails conspiracy theory that is far more complex than any of the theories I’ve already mentioned. Fomenko presents his ideas in a work in seven volumes titled History: Fiction or Science? that was published in English translation from 2003 to 2006.

Real historians will tell you that all of recorded human history spans a period of roughly five thousand years, from the roughly concurrent inventions of writing in ancient Sumer and Egypt sometime around 3000 BCE to the present day. Fomenko, by contrast, drawing on the previous writings of Hardouin, Johnson, Baldauf, and Morozov, claims that there are no written records of any kind that can be reliably dated to before around 1000 CE, that the eleventh century CE is when humans first invented writing and when human history first begins, and that human history does not, in fact, span roughly five thousand years, but rather only one thousand years.

He holds that all of the events of ancient and medieval Mediterranean and European history that really happened actually took place between c. 1000 CE and c. 1600 CE, that all ancient and medieval texts, monuments, artifacts, and artworks were either deliberately forged during the Renaissance or created during the Late Middle Ages and misdated to ancient times, that the European Jesuits deliberately fabricated all of non-European pre-modern history and all the documents and artifacts associated with it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that the pre-modern history of China is a Jesuit fabrication based on the supposed pre-modern history of Rome and Byzantium.

ABOVE: Photograph of the Russian mathematician and conspiracy theorist Anatoly T. Fomenko standing in front of a chalkboard, lecturing about mathematics

Fomenko’s methods

Fomenko adamantly rejects all established methods of absolute and relative dating, asserting that archaeological stratigraphic dating, radiocarbon dating, dendrochronological dating, stylistic pottery dating, paleographic dating, numismatic dating, and all other established historical and scientific dating techniques are completely useless. Instead, he maintains that “mathematical statistics” are the only valid way of dating historical people and events.

It is true that statistics can sometimes be useful in studying history and real historians do sometimes use them. Statistics, however, are tool, not a method of dating in and of themselves. As I previously explained in this article I wrote in November 2020, statistics are only as good as the data and assumptions on which they are based and the methods according to which they are used. Just because someone uses statistics that are mathematically sound does not mean that their conclusions are correct.

In the case of Fomenko, all his assumptions about history are simply atrocious. Throughout his work, Fomenko assumes that records for most of human history were commonly distorted to create wildly different accounts of the same events and that writers deliberately invented new names and dates for different accounts of the same events in order to fit all the accounts into a larger narrative without critically examining any of them. Fomenko claims that this results in many different “phantom copies” of the same people and events.

He routinely claims that historical figures who happen to have had the same or similar names and maybe did vaguely similar things who lived centuries apart are, in fact, merely different “phantom copies” of the same person. For instance, he claims that the philosophers Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE), Plotinos (lived c. 205 – 270 CE), and Georgios Gemistos Plethon (lived c. 1355 – 1452 CE) are all actually “phantom copies” of the same person. He similarly claims that events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years apart in totally different places that he perceives as similar must, in fact, be “phantom copies” of the same event.

He tries to support these claims using statistical models, which he claims show that the likelihood of two separate people or events having so many features in common is so small that they must be the same. The problem is that his data points are cherry-picked, extremely superficial similarities that he often exaggerates to make them seem more important than they really are.

Meanwhile, he completely ignores reasonable explanations for why these similarities might exist other than his own “phantom copy” hypothesis. He also ignores all the things that the people and events he is comparing don’t have in common and all the evidence indicating that these people and events are not the same.

For instance, he identifies many kings as having supposedly been the same people based mostly or entirely on his assertion that all the kings in their respective dynasties ruled for similar lengths of time parallel to each other, even though their reigns may actually differ by a matter of many years. He simply brushes aside any discrepancies by claiming that they are distortions.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an accelerator mass spectrometer, the machine that is now most commonly used for radiocarbon dating, which is one of the many well-established scientific absolute dating techniques that Anatoly Fomenko rejects

Fomenko, Russian nationalism, and ancient Rome denial

Fomenko also happens to be a Russian nationalist and a large part of his so-called “New Chronology” is dedicated to wildly inflating the significance of Russia in world history far beyond how significant it really was. He claims that the dominant global superpower throughout nearly all of recorded human history has been a mighty Russian empire, which he calls “the Russian Horde,” with the city of Moscow as its capital.

He claims that all the peoples associated with the general vicinity of what is now Russia throughout history—including the Skythians, the Huns, the Goths, the Bulgars, the Polianians, the Dulebes, the Drevlians, the Pechenegs, the Mongols, the Cossacks, the Ukrainians, the Belarusians, and all Turkic peoples—are, in fact, merely components of the single, united “Russian Horde.” He further maintains that the idea of these peoples as separate and distinct is a fabrication of western historians and British anti-Russian propaganda and that all the various ethnic groups of the former Soviet Union are essentially delusional for thinking that they are not all the same nation and ethnicity.

In line with his hypothesis that ancient history didn’t really happen, Fomenko claims that “Rome” is actually just a “placeholder name” that has been applied to many different empires at different times. He maintains that the name was first applied to an Egyptian kingdom with its capital at Alexandria, that it was later transferred to the Byzantine Roman Empire with its capital at Constantinople, and that it eventually came to refer to three different cities simultaneously: the actual city of Rome in Italy, Constantinople, and Moscow.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Red Square in Moscow, which is one of several cities to which Fomenko claims that the name “Rome” sometimes refers

And now back to the present…

Now we have reached the present day, in which a person named Donna Dickens (a.k.a. “momllennial_”) is creating a stir on TikTok by claiming that ancient Rome didn’t exist. I have literally spent hours of my life that I can’t get back watching at least sixty of Dickens’s videos, which I really should not have done because I should be working on final papers and my applications to ancient history PhD programs right now, but there’s something about someone denying such extremely well-documented history as the Roman Empire in such a flippant and derisive way that gets under my skin and makes me want to write some kind of response.

In the following sections, I will largely refrain from linking Dickens’s videos unless absolutely necessary because I don’t want to give their videos promoting ridiculous pseudohistory any more traffic than they have already received, especially since, as I will argue later, I’m pretty sure that Dickens is promoting these theories at least partly in order to attract attention.

Before I discuss Dickens’s crackpot Rome theory, I feel I should note that there are some things that I respect about them. Politically, they and I have much in common; we’re both very left-wing and concerned with social justice. Also, although nearly everything Dickens says about history is wildly wrong, they do occasionally say things that are correct that I feel are worth mentioning.

For instance, in a video they posted in April 2021 with a thumbnail image that reads “Origins of Ancient Aliens Is Racist,” they correctly and succinctly point out both the racist origins of the ancient astronaut hypothesis and the fundamentally racist assumptions that still underlie it today. I happen to have written an entire article about this myself in September 2021 titled “The Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis Is Racist and Harmful,” in which I make an argument that is very similar to the one Dickens makes.

The only historical error Dickens makes in this particular video is that they say Robert Charroux “invented” the ancient astronaut hypothesis, when, in reality, he was only popularizing a hypothesis that two earlier French Nazi-obsessed occult writers named Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels had already proposed in their book Le Matin des Magiciens, or The Morning of the Magicians, published in 1960.

ABOVE: Photographs of Robert Charroux (left) and Erich von Däniken (right), both very racist men who have been highly influential in promoting the ancient astronaut hypothesis

How Dickens differs from previous ancient Rome deniers

Dickens is very different from previous ancient Rome deniers for many reasons, but I will single out four of them. The most obvious difference is simply demographic. Historically, people who have publicly denied the existence of ancient Rome have nearly all been white men of Christian or irreligious upbringing who were at least in their fifties by the time they began publicly promoting this theory.

Dickens, by contrast, states in their TikTok bio that they are Jewish and that they use she/they pronouns. In a video they posted in July 2021 with a thumbnail that says “Using Gendered Pronouns,” they specifically state that they were assigned female at birth, that they are in their “mid-to-late thirties,” and that they are nonbinary, but they have no problem with people calling them “she” because that is what they are accustomed to. (In this article, I consistently refer to them as “they” because my understanding is that “she/they” means someone wishes to be called “they” every once in a while, so I’m making up for the fact that everyone else is consistently calling Dickens “she.”)

Another major difference is that past ancient Rome deniers all promoted their conspiracy theories through voluminous printed treatises that often span many volumes and have scholarly pretensions that make them generally extremely boring to the vast majority of people. As a result, very few people who are ignorant and gullible enough to believe their theories are willing to actually drudge through their work. Meanwhile, the people who are actually willing to read written works of such length and dullness are mostly educated and skeptical enough to know that everything these authors say is complete nonsense that flies in the face of all the available evidence.

Dickens, by contrast, is advancing their theories through short, viral videos on an online social media platform. Most of their videos denying the existence of ancient Rome are less than one minute long; the longest is only three minutes long. This allows them to promote their claims far more effectively than people like Hardouin, Johnson, Baldauf, Morozov, and Fomenko. All of Dickens’s videos have received tens of thousands of views; I suspect that there are more people who have watched at least one of their videos than there are who have ever read any part of the work of any individual ancient Rome denier before them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a complete set of all seven volumes of Anatoly T. Fomenko’s extremely long and dense collection History: Fiction or Science?

A third major difference is that, while ancient Rome deniers in the past have routinely made completely false and ridiculous claims, they at least generally have not tried to deny things that a person can easily verify are true with their own eyes. Dickens, on the other hand, makes blatant assertions that contradict what any person who is not blind can see with their own eyes.

For example, the Qaṣr Ibrîm Papyrus is a very famous papyrus fragment that was discovered at the site of Qaṣr Ibrîm in Egypt in 1978 bearing nine lines of an elegiac poem in the Latin language written by the Roman poet Cornelius Gallus (lived c. 70 – 26 BCE). The papyrus is dated to between c. 50 BCE and c. 25 CE, based on known information about the date of the poet’s life, the archaeological context in which it was found, and the style of the writing, making it possibly the oldest surviving manuscript of Latin poetry.

The scholars R. D. Anderson, P. J. Parsons and R. G. M. Nisbet extensively analyze the archaeological context, text, and writing style of the fragment in their paper “Elegiacs by Gallus from Qaṣr Ibrîm,” published in 1979 in The Journal of Roman Studies (Vol. 69, pp. 125-155). You can read the paper on JSTOR if you have access.

Someone like Fomenko would probably respond to this fragment by trying to claim that it must date to the Late Middle Ages or that it must be a modern forgery. These claims would, of course, be false, but the average person would not know they were false just by looking at a photo of the papyrus. Dickens, by contrast, responds to an image of the papyrus in one of their videos by insisting that the text is actually in Greek—even though anyone with eyes can clearly and easily see the Latin writing. The opening lines of the papyrus read:

“Fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia, quom tu
maxima Romanae pars eris historiae
postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum
fixa legam spolieis deivitiora tueis.”

Anyone who knows anything about Latin can easily tell you that this is Latin, but, just in case you’d like to have the opinion of a verifiable Latin expert, Dr. Maxwell T. Paule is a tenured professor of classics at Earlham College who has a profile on TikTok, where he frequently posts excellent short videos about topics related to ancient Greece and Rome.

It also just so happens that Paule has made several videos in response to Dickens’s conspiracy theories, including this one in which he analyzes her videos as examples of “conspiracy theory logic” and this one in which he specifically points out the ludicrousness of her claim that the Qaṣr Ibrîm Papyrus is actually Greek.

ABOVE: Photograph of the famous Qaṣr Ibrîm Papyrus, which dates to between c. 50 BCE and c. 25 CE and bears nine lines of an elegiac poem in Latin by the Roman poet Cornelius Gallus

The fourth major way in which Dickens is different from earlier ancient Rome deniers is that, unlike any of the ancient Rome deniers I have mentioned previously, there is also compelling evidence that Dickens is outright lying about their supposed credentials. They claim in their TikTok bio that they have a BA in anthropology and history. Their publicly visible LinkedIn profile claims that they received this degree from Western Kentucky University in 2005.

Despite these claims, Aidan Mattis, who uses the TikTok handle “theaidanmattis” and has made a whole series of TikToks debunking Dickens’s claims, made a video in which he says that he checked the online graduation lists from Western Kentucky University in 2005. He notes that Dickens’s real first name is Donna. He, however, says that he found that no one with this name graduated from Western Kentucky University in that year—not in the May or the December graduation. He says that, just to be sure, he also checked the lists for 2004 and 2006 and found that no one named Donna graduated from the university in either of those years either.

Mattis acknowledges that there could be something that he has missed, but, based on what evidence he has been able to find, the most likely explanation seems to be that Dickens is simply lying about having a degree in history and anthropology.

Dickens posted a video in response to Mattis on 28 November 2021 with a thumbnail that reads “My Only Response to Aidan Mattis.” In the video, they call Mattis a “genuine white supremacist” and point out his unsavory right-wing political activism while he was in college, including his co-founding of the Pennsylvania State University chapter of the right-wing organization Turning Point USA and what they describe as his “harassment” of the Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg.

As disturbing as all this information about Mattis’s background is, however, Dickens does not make any kind of response to his accusation that they are lying about their degree, which really makes it seem like there is some genuine merit to the accusation and Dickens is trying to distract from it by making ad hominem attacks.

ABOVE: Screenshot from Dickens’s video in which they respond to Aidan Mattis and accuse him of being a “genuine white supremacist,” while leaving his claim that they might be lying about their degree effectively unchallenged

Why do this? Attention seeking? Trolling?

One thing I find especially interesting in trying to figure out Dickens’s motivations is that, until very recently, Dickens seems to have fully believed that ancient Rome existed and they have posted many previous videos on TikTok in which they speak of the existence of Rome as though it were unchallenged fact.

For instance, they posted a video in June 2021 with a thumbnail that reads “Ancient Rome Was H0m0ph0bic,” in which they not only seem to acknowledge that ancient Rome existed, but also give a fairly accurate summary of ancient Roman attitudes toward male homosexuality. Unfortunately, they try to use this to advance the completely unsound assertion that Alexander the Great was somehow secretly either a woman or a “nonbinary person with a womb” and that the Romans covered it up because they hated women and bottoms.

A video that I find even more interesting, however, is one Dickens posted on 10 November 2021, which bears the thumbnail “Infibulation Was A Serious Problem In Ancient Rome.” Everything about the video really makes it sound like Dickens believed that ancient Rome existed at the time they made the video. Near the very beginning of the video, Dickens says:

“Do you guys not know what FGM is? And that the worst of it was invented by the Romans? Trigger warning: body horror. The Romans invented the word infibulation. Google at your own risk.”

The word infibulation has several different possible meanings, but Dickens is clearly using it to refer to a specific form of female genital mutilation in which the vaginal opening is completely sutured shut, apart from a very small opening to allow the discharge of urine and menstrual blood.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Donna Dickens’s TikTok showing their video claiming that the ancient Romans invented infibulation

ABOVE: Screenshot showing the date of Donna Dickens’s video about ancient Roman infibulation as “11–10” or 10 November 2021.

Predictably, Dickens does not cite any sources to support their claim, nor have I been able to find any evidence that the ancient Romans invented or even practiced infibulation. My guess is that Dickens simply assumed this based on the fact that the English word infibulation is derived from the Latin verb infibulare, meaning “to close with a clasp.”

I’m not, however, aware of any evidence that the Romans used this word to describe the practice that Dickens discusses in their video. In fact, all the references to ancient Roman infibulation that I have been able to find are references to male infibulation, which is a practice in which the foreskin of an uncircumcised penis is clasped over the glans to prevent it from becoming exposed.

There were two main forms of this practice in ancient Rome. One form, which was more common among the Greeks, involved merely tying the foreskin over the glans with a string or leather cord, which the Greeks called a κυνοδέσμη (kynodésmē), which was worn only temporarily while a man was nude in public. The other form, which was more common among the Romans, involved piercing the foreskin and closing it over the glans with a metal ring known as a fibula.

The reason why the Greeks and Romans sometimes practiced male infibulation is because they regarded having one’s glans covered by the foreskin as a sign of modesty and regarded having it exposed in public as barbaric.

ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing detail of a Greek vase painting depicting an athlete wearing a κυνοδέσμη, dating to sometime around 480 BCE, attributed to the Triptolemos Painter

None of this really matters for my point, though, which is that, in this video, Dickens seems to speak as though the ancient Romans definitely existed and they definitely invented infibulation.

Dickens made several videos claiming that ancient historical evidence was untrustworthy before making their first video in which they flat-out assert that ancient Rome did not exist. The video bears a thumbnail image with the words “’Ancient Rome’ Isn’t Real,” followed by two “serious face” emojis.

If you check the date, you will notice that the video in question was posted on 16 November 2021—six days after the video in which Dickens claims that the ancient Romans invented infibulation.

In the video, Dickens appears with a filter that makes it look like they have teddy bear ears and an adhesive bandage over their nose. They declare with the utmost display of confidence and incredulity:

“Right, so you’re telling me you got an entire degree in classics and it never occurred to you that there isn’t a single Roman document? It always blows my mind talking to people who have invested their lives in the study of ancient Rome because y’all don’t seem to have realized it didn’t exist. It is a figment of the Spanish Inquisition’s imagination!”

This is all, of course, complete nonsense and you can probably easily notice the indirect influence from Jean Hardouin’s theory of the supposed late medieval Benedictine conspiracy. What I find most striking about this, though, is not just the air of confidence and incredulity with which Dickens asserts these patently absurd things, but also the fact that they do so in a video that they posted only six days after a video in which they themself very clearly spoke of the ancient Romans as though they existed.

Even if we ignore the patent absurdity of Dickens’s claims, there’s an undeniable whiff of dishonesty about the way they act as though the supposed non-existence of ancient Rome is something obvious that they’ve known for a long time when, in fact, they made a video only six days before treating ancient Rome as though it were real.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Donna Dickens in the first of many videos in which they claim that ancient Rome didn’t exist

The suspicious timeline of Dickens, who we already have reason to suspect is lying about their degree, suddenly going from claiming that ancient Rome was totally real and the ancient Romans invented infibulation one day to claiming that ancient Rome never existed in the first place six days later leads me to strongly suspect that Dickens is not arguing in good faith for things they actually believe, but rather making deliberately ridiculous claims in order to generate views, likes, and followers and to troll ancient Rome fans on TikTok, whom they frequently mock and complain about in their videos going back many months at least.

I think that Meg Finlayson, who uses the handle “agameganon” on Twitter, has fundamentally the right take in this thread they posted on 12 November 2021:

Hating Rome isn’t an excuse for pseudohistory

I do, however, suspect that Dickens has more motivation for claiming that ancient Rome did not exist than mere trolling and attention-seeking. If they were solely trying to attract fame and attention, they could have simply claimed to have been abducted by aliens or claimed any number of wonky things about any subject. Why are they specifically claiming that ancient Rome did not exist?

The answer, I think, lies in Dickens’s attitude toward Rome. The one consistent theme in all their videos about the ancient Romans and Rome’s present-day admirers is a general disliking for them. Moreover, in many of their videos, they claim that ancient Rome was made up by the Roman Catholic Church, which they also regard highly unfavorably. It therefore seems that Dickens’s purpose in denying that ancient Rome ever existed is at least partly to attack the Romans’ reputation for importance in world history by claiming that they never existed and that they were invented by the evil Catholic Church.

There are many perfectly good things to despise about both ancient Roman society and the Roman Catholic Church, especially for a Jewish afab nonbinary person, since both the ancient Romans and the Roman Catholic Church have historically treated Jewish people, afab people, and people who don’t conform to binary gender expectations rather poorly to say the least. Quite frankly, there is a lot that I personally hate about both the ancient Romans and the Roman Catholic Church myself.

Hating the Romans, however, does not give someone an excuse to promote blatant pseudohistorical claims that they never existed.