"THIS is my Roman Empire": From Meme to Pop Culture
Where It Actually Started
Viral moments rarely start where you think they did. The Roman Empire conversation didn’t explode out of nowhere in 2023, it had been quietly building for almost a year before that.
It traces back to Swedish influencer Saskia Cort, who in September 2022 posted screenshots of DMs about how often men thought about the Roman Empire. Funny, niche, didn’t particularly set the world on fire. Fast forward to August 2023, and an Instagram account called @GaiusFlavius (perfect) posted a Reel with the caption: “Ladies, many of you don’t realise how often men think about the Roman Empire.” That one landed differently.
From there it hit TikTok, and by September 2023 a full wave of women were turning to the men in their lives and asking, cameras rolling, how often do you actually think about Rome? The answers were alarming. And wonderful. Every few days. Every day. A surprising number couldn’t explain why, legions, aqueducts, Julius Caesar, just sort of rattling around up there. A YouGov survey confirmed it: significantly more men than women reported thinking about the Roman Empire regularly. It sounds absurd until you realise it isn’t really about Rome at all.
The Pivot: “This Is MY Roman Empire”
The really interesting moment isn’t the original trend. It’s what happened next.
By mid-September 2023, the phrase had mutated. “My Roman Empire” became a template, a way of describing your own version of the thing. Your unexplained obsession. The topic you can’t let go of. The thing you think about in the shower when you’re supposed to be paying attention to something else entirely.
Suddenly it wasn’t about ancient history. It was about a TV episode from 2003 that still doesn’t make sense. A celebrity interaction from six years ago. That one time someone mispronounced something in a meeting. The hashtag #RomanEmpire hit 3.5 billion views on TikTok. Videos tagged “my Roman Empire” racked up nearly 30 million views covering everything from Harry Styles to The Notebook. The phrase made it into mainstream media glossaries as slang you needed to know heading into 2024. That’s when you know something has properly crossed over.
Why This One Stuck
Lots of things go viral. Very few become part of the language. “My Roman Empire” managed it because it hits a rare combination: universally relatable without being generic.
The Roman Empire as a reference is funny because it’s unexpected but the underlying feeling it describes is something genuinely everyone has. That combination of specificity and universality is the secret formula for a meme that lasts. And the template is endlessly remixable: [thing you can’t stop thinking about] is my Roman Empire. You plug in your own content and it works every time, across communities, demographics, and countries.
Crucially, it required participation. The trend was built on people physically asking someone a question, filming the response, and sharing it. That interactive quality meant the content kept multiplying with a built-in engine for growth that most campaigns pay a lot of money to try to engineer.
When Brands Showed Up (and Who Got It Right)
Once a phrase reaches cultural saturation, brands come knocking. Some understood the room. Some absolutely didn’t.
The ones who got it played it light. United Airlines promoted flights to Rome, simple, self-aware, on-brief. Red Bull nodded to Max Verstappen’s dominance, tapping an audience already inside the joke.
ClassPass arguably had the sharpest execution: a TikTok ad saying “My Roman Empire is how I booked a month of workout classes for free with ClassPass and there are still people missing out on this deal.” Shameless? Yes. But it sounds like a real person, not a marketing team and that’s genuinely hard to pull off.
The brands that stumbled arrived late, explained the meme in their own content (never a good sign), or tried to use the format for something so disconnected it felt jarring. The Roman Empire meme has no room for brands that take themselves too seriously.
What It Actually Teaches Marketers
This isn’t just a fun internet anecdote. It’s a case study in how language forms online and what that means for brands trying to speak it fluently.
Meme campaigns, when they land, pull 60% organic engagement compared to roughly 5% for standard marketing graphics. NYU research found memes are ten times more effective than regular marketing visuals. But the reason those numbers exist is because the memes that work feel like participation, not promotion. The difference between ClassPass’s post landing and a competitor’s falling flat isn’t budget, it’s timing, instinct, and tone.
There’s something broader here too. Gen Z and younger millennials don’t just consume pop culture, they use it to explain who they are. “My Roman Empire is [X]” tells you something about a person that a straightforward “I really like this thing” never would. That kind of cultural vocabulary is gold for brands that don’t just want to speak the language, but actually live in it.
Final Thoughts
“My Roman Empire” is in the dictionary of internet expression that millions pull from every day, in comment sections, WhatsApp messages, TikTok bios. It arrived with a specific context and quietly became useful enough to stay.
That’s the trajectory every viral moment hopes for. Most don’t make it. This one did because it was funny, flexible, human, and landed at exactly the right moment on exactly the right platform. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but apparently it’s thought about in one.
Want help with navigating your social strategy? Let’s chat.