Why Speculative Fiction Keeps Rebuilding Rome

Rome has a way of resurfacing when you are not looking for it. It appears in science-fiction empires that span galaxies, in fantasy legions marching under unfamiliar banners and in systems so vast and orderly that they seem less like governments than permanent features of the world.

I have felt that pull for as long as I can remember. As a child reading Asterix, I was supposed to root for the unruly Gauls, yet I often found myself studying the Roman camps instead: the straight rows of tents, the palisades, the almost hypnotic suggestion that everything had been assigned its proper place.

Much later, lectures on the Roman food supply made the attraction clearer. Rome depended on tax grain, private shipping, ports, warehouses, officials and distribution systems capable of feeding a city on a scale that its immediate surroundings could not support. The empire was not simply an army or a culture. It was a machinery for turning conquest into routine.

That may be why speculative fiction keeps rebuilding it. Rome supplies more than eagles, marble, roads and military ranks. It offers a model of power that can make domination look administrative, stability look natural and a political settlement look as though it has always existed.

From a distance, the system looks permanent. Editorial image generated by the author.

When Conquest Starts to Look Like Nature

The most persistent Roman inheritance in speculative fiction is not an aesthetic but a feeling: an empire can become so old, extensive and embedded that its existence no longer appears to require explanation. It becomes the background against which explanations occur.

Red Rising presents the Society as a perfected order whose hierarchy has been engineered into the body. Foundation begins with an empire already declining, although most of its inhabitants cannot perceive the scale of the process. Warhammer 40,000 pushes the idea further: decay has ceased to be a crisis and become the normal operating condition of the state.

These empires differ in tone and purpose, but each controls the language through which its failures are understood. Rebellion becomes disorder, lost territory becomes a temporary reversal and institutional cruelty becomes the regrettable cost of preserving civilisation. Even when the structure is brittle, it teaches its subjects to interpret brittleness as a series of local problems rather than evidence against the whole.

Rome is unusually powerful as a model because it lasted long enough and left enough visible residue to feel eternal in retrospect. Roads, legal concepts, cities, languages, churches and ruined public works survived the political arrangements that created them. The remains can make permanence appear to have been Rome’s essential quality, even though people living within the empire experienced civil war, disputed succession, fiscal pressure, plague and territorial loss.

Speculative fiction lets us inhabit that contradiction. From inside an empire, permanence is not necessarily a claim anyone needs to defend. It is an assumption built into maps, offices, calendars and the expectation that tomorrow’s problems will still be processed by the same institutions.

The View from the Road

Imperial stability depends on where the observer is standing. From the centre, infrastructure appears as proof of order. The Roman road network connected territories and military outposts; shipping and storage moved food and material across long distances; taxation, law and record-keeping made very different regions legible to the state.

That capacity was real, and it could support trade, urban life and predictable administration. It also served conquest. The road that carries merchants can carry soldiers and tax demands. The record that protects a recognised property claim can also identify what may be seized. Administrative competence does not sit outside imperial violence; it is one of the means by which violence becomes regular, repeatable and less visible.

In The Traitor Baru Cormorant, empire works through taxation, schools, accounting and the replacement of local norms with imperial common sense. Its deepest victory would be achieved when its subjects begin evaluating themselves through the categories imposed upon them. In Red Rising, the Society’s elegance depends on engineered castes whose suffering has been removed from the ruling class’s field of vision. Dune places the same relation beneath dynastic mysticism: the imperial world runs on spice, while the people and ecology of Arrakis absorb the cost.

The works do not expose hidden hypocrisy by showing that empire produces nothing of value. Their sharper point is that achievement and oppression can be built by the same system. Roads, security and coordination may be impressive precisely because so much extraction has been organised to sustain them.

That is why a functioning empire can be more seductive than a merely brutal one. Competence encourages the thought that authority has earned obedience. Order invites admiration before the question of distribution has been asked: who receives stability, and whose labour, danger and dispossession make it possible?

The Legion Makes Empire Lovable

If infrastructure makes empire durable, the legion makes it emotionally legible. Bureaucracies are difficult to love. Comradeship is not.

The Roman legion persists in fantasy as an image of discipline, cohesion and earned belonging. In Codex Alera, the model is embraced largely as a technology of competence: people with different strengths become effective by trusting formation, training and command. In Malazan Book of the Fallen, military professionalism remains admirable at the level of the squad while becoming morally ambiguous at the level of conquest. Soldiers may be loyal, funny and brave without the campaign they serve becoming just.

The tension is not accidental. The qualities that make a legion admirable—coordination, endurance, shared identity and willingness to sacrifice—also make it an effective instrument of control. It offers individuals meaning by placing them inside something larger, but the institution decides what that larger purpose is.

This helps explain why stories about empire often concentrate on soldiers rather than administrators. A tax office reveals the system’s appetite; a cohort reveals its human bond. The reader can experience belonging, courage and mutual dependence from inside the machine even while recognising what the machine does beyond the frame.

Rome supplies a particularly durable version of that ambiguity. The legion can represent citizenship and mobility, coercion and occupation, professional pride and disciplined violence. Speculative fiction inherits all of these possibilities at once. It can admire the formation without pretending that everyone outside it experiences the same order as protection.

An Empire Rarely Experiences Its Own Fall

Empires are not usually organised around the expectation of their disappearance. A crisis can be temporary, a lost province recoverable and a corrupt ruler replaceable. The institution interprets each failure through concepts that preserve the assumption that the institution itself will continue.

Foundation makes this temporal blindness explicit. Decline can be modelled over centuries while remaining difficult to recognise as a single event in an ordinary life. Warhammer 40,000 imagines a state that has already lost almost everything except its rituals, enemies and ability to continue. In Red Rising, early cracks in the Society appear as local disruptions that can be contained, punished or explained away rather than signs that the order has forfeited its legitimacy.

The western Roman Empire ended with similar untidiness. Its political unravelling involved wars, territorial contraction, competing rulers and the growth of successor kingdoms; 476 remains a useful marker rather than a clean civilisational stop. The Roman state continued in the east, while people in the west encountered changing authorities and adapted institutions rather than a single moment when an empire visibly vanished.

That messiness strengthens the fictional analogy. Large systems absorb shocks, rename losses and preserve familiar procedures while their underlying capacities change. Collapse becomes obvious in retrospect because history supplies a beginning and an end. Those living through it may experience only another emergency followed by another improvised settlement.

Why We Keep Rebuilding Rome

Rome gives speculative fiction a language for systems too large to perceive from within. Sometimes the borrowing is explicit: emperors, eagles, legions and marble. Sometimes only the structure remains—professional armies, extractive provinces, administrative centres and a ruling order that mistakes its reach for permanence.

The attraction is not simply that Rome was powerful. Many states have been powerful. Rome converted power into roads, offices, supply systems, ranks and habits that survived individual rulers and sometimes the empire’s political control. It shows how violence can disappear into procedure and how conquest can be remembered as infrastructure.

There is also something uncomfortable in the pleasure of looking at such systems. Order is visually satisfying. Coordination is impressive. Competence can make authority feel deserved, especially when the costs have been moved beyond the centre’s line of sight.

I still think about the Roman camps in Asterix: the clean lines, the palisades and the assurance that everything had its place. I read them then as stability. What I was seeing was a picture in which the labour, fear and coercion required to maintain the arrangement had been hidden by the arrangement’s success.

That may be the Roman illusion speculative fiction keeps rebuilding. If power can become orderly enough, its choices begin to resemble architecture—and architecture is easy to mistake for nature.