Why is the Roman Empire like a carrot? Cause men need vegetables five times a day.

That joke’s not particularly good but it is mine, and riffs on the now well-known meme that men, and particularly men struggling with modernity, think about the Roman Empire five times a day.

It was probably in some similar spirit then that the British Museum posted a version of it on Instagram. This originated on Tiktok and satirised the exhibition as being somewhere where sad and lonely girlies might go and suffer a bit of mansplaining in their quest for a husband. Apologies to the originator of the meme for not crediting you – it wasn’t easy to find a credit for you on the BM’s post and I can’t your original meme now. This is the BM’s now-deleted (thank you) version.

The problem is really in the exhibition and its evocation of a Roman Army that is almost exclusively about the soldiers, as I’ve written before. So, when the BM posts a meme that satirises what its exhibition is about, the satire gets lost in the new context. Cue an unsurprising slew of misogynistic posts on the BM’s Instagram feed.

A few – mostly women – on Instagram asked the BM to take it down. The BM replied with a sorry-not-sorry non apology that ‘splained to the humourless women that they had misunderstood. There’s an irony there that the BM comms was ‘splaining to women the meme satirised the idea that women are easily confused and also ‘splaining to archaeologists the importance of contexts but nm we puke and move on. The misogyny sewage on the BM’s Instagram continued.

By now quite a lot of women archaeologists including me were independently getting pretty fed up that whatever the BM’s initial intentions had predictably turned into a sexism-fest. We posted this on social media. It’s not a co-ordinated thing, but it does create a pile-on and there is quite likely a junior comms officer who is having a rubbish day as a result. It is poor handling by the museum but to say it’s only their comms department’s fault is a cop-out. The choices the exhibition makes present a picture of an army almost exclusively of combatants. The exhibition has no reception element to discuss modern uses of Roman military, the most impactful of which comes from Nazi Germany, where their ideas about the Roman army were used as part of their ideologies. It chose to present Roman standards in a way that draws on the long hanging banners on buildings that were used in Nazi pageantry and ceremonies. There’s a good account of Nazi use of this imagery in Life magazine here: https://www.life.com/history/a-brutal-pageantry-the-third-reichs-myth-making-machinery-in-color

Normally when there’s an important modern reception history, an exhibition will discuss this, as the British Museum did in its ‘Celtic’ exhibition, where ideas of nationality and sectarianism were discussed as an integral part of the exhibition. In fact I’ve since learned that they did two versions of the reception element of that exhibition – one for its National Museums of Scotland showing and one for in London, to factor in the different visitors. Not so here. Nor did the exhibition choose to e.g., focus on the importance of the Rosalia festival, which also disrupts the mimeographic representation of the banners and humanises Roman soldiers too; as men who grieved their dead. There’s a great blog about the Rosalia here:  https://www.vindolanda.com/blog/rosaliae-signorum-rose-festivals-of-the-standards

The BM’s exhibition priorities are combatants, and everyone else, including probably its comms department, has in the process been trodden on. This is what is underneath it all. The BM has deleted its stupid Instagram post and o no, I don’t want some junior comms person to carry the can for this one. Yes, the comms handling was bad, but the problems happened fundamentally because of the exhibition itself.