Friday Friday, July 10, 2026 (On the Chud Vision of Roman History) – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
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Bret Devereaux
Fireside
July 10, 2026
14 Minutes
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...