Friday Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History)

Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’ve been a bit behind because we had some family travel followed by an issue with a water leak in the basement which has pushed me out of my normal home office space (fortunately no books or computers were harmed and we’re working on water damage restoration now). All of which has a nasty habit of throwing off your work schedule. For patrons wondering where the latest research update is – it is in much the same place, ‘coming’ and for much the same reason.

Percy balancing carefully on my bookshelves, which were being emptied in preparation for putting new, rather nicer looking shelves in. Alas, that process was delayed by a water leak which fortunately spared all of my books but unfortunately is requiring us to tear our and replace a good deal of the basement flooring.

That said, I’ve wanted to do a musing for a few weeks expanding on some of my thoughts on what I am going to call ‘the chuds’1 (often also referred to as the ‘statue pfps’)2 a group of online ancient and medieval history ‘fans’ (mostly, but not exclusively, on Twitter) whose interest in the pre-modern past is anchored in extremely reactionary political ideology (generally some mix of racism, sexism and authoritarianism). I wrote something of an anthropology of this group for The Bulwark a month back, occasioned by bit of culture-war nonsense around the upcoming Odyssey adaptation which spilled over into a discussion of Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer. So I want to muse a bit on the oddity of ‘history fans’ who don’t know any history and why they end up that way.

Now, I should state at the outset that the structure of ‘chud classics’ on Twitter is a radicalization pipeline: the algorithm channels users who like more mild, less openly fascist accounts (and sometimes just straight up non-fascist ones) towards more concentrated more openly fascist accounts.

As a result, there are some accounts at the ‘clean’ end of the pipe that are unobjectionable (I’ve never seen anything ‘off’ from @culturaltutor, for instance), but they’re tied together in the eco-system where if you follow one, you get recommended the others and at least some of the accounts in the middle are quite aware of what they’re doing, actively promoting accounts on the ‘sludge end’ of the pipe. This post is largely about accounts, however, on the sludge-end of the pipeline – @romanhelmetguy, @updatingonrome, @latinedisce, @thehellenist and so on. But I want to be clear, I’m not saying, ‘everyone in this pipe is a fascist,’ but I am saying, ‘the water in this pipe flows inexorably towards fascism’ (because the guy who owned Twitter has decided it should) and at the very least the fellows at the ‘clean’ end up the pipe never quite seem to denounce the sludge end.

What I want to return to is the oddity I pointed out in that piece that the chuds are both really attached to classical antiquity and also don’t know very much about it. Because the inciting incident was a debate over translating Homer, that point got expressed mostly in terms of the fact that a lot of the largest chud accounts that purport to explain antiquity to others don’t know Greek (which makes it pretty hard to have a useful opinion on a translation)! But that is hardly to limit of it: right after the Homer debate, one of the larger chuds got into a second argument with some actual classicists, outraged, Outraged! that they consider the stories in the first couple of books of Livy as basically fables, evidently unaware that among the figures who think the first five books of Livy might be unreliable is…Livy himself! He says as much at the beginning of book 6! But of course the fellow had never read beyond the cool legends in the first two books and so had no sense that the character of Livy’s history of Rome changes quite significantly as Livy gets access to better sources.

And I initially found that lack of knowledge actually kind of puzzling, because the chuds don’t have deep knowledge about any part of ancient or medieval history.

That was initially surprising. Working on pre-gunpowder arms and armor, I am used to history enthusiast spaces (like HEMA or historical dress YouTube and such), where you have a lot of passionate, often self-taught folks who are interested in history. And the thing is, there’s a pattern for those folks, which is that they tend to have odd gaps and assumptions in their knowledge, but they also tend to be a mile deep in the details of the specific things that interest them. It’s the classic, ‘guy who has at best a fuzzy sense of what Reconstruction was but can tell you the exact position of every Maine regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg, hour by hour’ sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong – that can have its own problems (especially for the American Civil War) – but there’s deep knowledge about something there.

To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. As a history educator, engaging with that autodidact enthusiast can be really rewarding, because they are often really excited to let you basically ‘widen’ their potholes, to overstretch the metaphor.

But the chuds…it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.

This really started striking me when I got a bunch of them mad about ‘Great Man’ history (a topic we need to address at some length at some point), because they all had the same very short list of available ‘great men.’ For antiquity, it was Julius Caesar and Alexander III over and over again.

Put aside the problems with pure, uncut ‘Great Man’ history. Never Demosthenes or Iphikrates or Seleucus I Nicator. Or on the Roman side, always Julius Caesar, never Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (or Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus), Titus Quinctius Flamininus, or Lucius Aemilius Paullus, much less Appius Claudius Caecus or Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Or, of course, our boy, the man, the legend, Publius Ventidius Bassus ::airhorn sounds::. Of for the guys who are really into the crusades (for really unfortunate reasons), it’s all vague AI images of ‘crusaders’ (invariably Templars), rather than anyone, like, pouring over the details of the Siege of Acre (1189-1191) during the Third Crusade. The pool of their knowledge is all puddle, no potholes – there’s no depth anywhere.3

Which is so strange if you approach the ‘chud community’ as a group of misguided ‘history buffs,’ but suddenly makes sense if you understand them effectively working backwards to their fascination with antiquity.

They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.

I actually wrote this all last Monday and then, after I had written it all, Vice President Vance, of all people, provided a nearly perfect perfect example of this process of working backwards from ideology to the past. In a passage in his book (which I encountered via a New York Times article) about one of his favorite prayers, he declares the prayer “feels medieval” but was in fact written in the 19th century (in the rather specific context of the threat to the Pope’s temporal authority – that is, his power as an earthly, secular prince – against the newly created Kingdom of Italy) – and it feels medieval and mystical to him specifically because “you could almost see the angels and demons doing battle” fitting an ideological need for confrontation and heroism even though its origins are not medieval or mystical at all, but quite modern and also rather earthly.

Vance acknowledges the actual date of the prayer (though not its political context), but it doesn’t bother him: what matters is that the prayer can be mobilized to fit his ideological needs, not that it actually fits any particular historical context.

From the New York Times, the relevant passage involving the prayer.

So the emotion – the feeling of alienation and disgust from living in a liberal, multiethnic society – come first and the rationalization and search for a new anchors for identity come second. And if all you know about antiquity is what one might learn in an undergraduate course or in high school, it seems initially like a useful ‘anchor’ for that emotion. What they ‘know,’ after all, is that Greece and Rome are the origin point of something called ‘western civilization’ which is either the reason for or a demonstration of the essential ‘special-ness’ of white people (and thus makes them special boys, a necessary salve for their wounded egos) and that those ancient societies had ‘heroic’ leaders who serve to satisfy both the fascist quest for the cult of heroism but also provide archetypal ‘manly men’ who can serve as an anchor for their wounded masculinity because (as Eco notes!) masculinity-anxiety is at the heart of the emotional brew of fascism.

Of course almost all of that is sublimated. What is visible is that their interest in antiquity is focused on on using it as a ‘proof’ for their ideology, rather than for the sake of interest or curiosity. So they seize on individual elements that seem ‘manly’ or ‘heroic’ or which reinforce a white supremacist or male-dominant ideology because the purpose isn’t to understand the Romans but to provide a comforting salve to their wounded feelings.

Which also explains why they don’t ever go deep, develop those ‘potholes’ of knowledge: because while classical antiquity might look at a great distance like a comforting resting place for their ideology, up close it doesn’t fit at all. Instead, it offers quite a lot of challenges. Ancient stereotypes and bigotries do not map cleanly on to modern racism and in any event the clear tendency from classical antiquity is that diversity was a winning strategy – societies that more successfully and more fully incorporated culturally and ethnically different groups won. Societies that stayed small and homogeneous lost.