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.
Continue reading “The Surprisingly Long History of the Conspiracy Theory that Ancient Rome Didn’t Exist”