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Washington, D.C., America’s built-to-order capital city, is a case in point. Its street plan might be a Paris knock-off, but its architecture is pure Rome: marble and columns everywhere, carved pediments full of classical figures, and a breath-taking pomposity. Even the iconic Washington Monument takes a page from the Roman playbook (Rome and Constantinople each had an obelisk poached from Egypt in Imperial times). It says volumes about the insecurities of the Founding Fathers that they were so desperate to dress their authority in garments borrowed from a civilization that never touched their shores.

It’s always “suckled by” in the telling. Never “raised by” or “adopted by.” Apparently, wolf’s milk was at that time (but not before or ever since) some sort of mystically charged superfood.

Here’s the grim story in full. Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last Etruscan king, raped the Roman noblewoman Lucretia.  As celebrated by later (male) Latin authors, Lucretia reported the assault to her father and husband, demanded justice, and then “nobly” saved her family’s honor by falling on a handy, shame-erasing sword. This tragic episode elevated victim-shaming to a virtue in (again, male) Roman eyes and did nothing but fortify their already robust misogyny. The only comfort I can find is that Lucretia was almost certainly mythological—for all the good that did generations of Roman women who still had to put up with this puerile nonsense.

This idea had legs, with senates and senators aplenty in our modern era. The name Senatus was drawn from senex, Latin for “elderly man”—rather fitting, as these bodies still tend to be old boy’s clubs two thousand years later.

It breaks my heart to tell you that the wolf-suckled twins had a violent falling out over who was better at counting flying birds. Remus did not survive their quarrel (reputedly slain by his brother’s hand) and probably ended up as fish food in the Tiber. For many future Romans, the moral of the story was “fratricide works.” They weren’t living in “Rema” or part of the “Reman” Senate, for chrissakes. The plummet in aristocratic life expectancy during the late Republic and Empire did nothing to disabuse them of such stupidity.

Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (“On the Gallic War”) was long considered a masterpiece of Latin prose and thus foisted upon generations of ungrateful Latin students (including yours truly). It’s fantastic propaganda, triumphantly chronicling the general’s conquest of today’s France and Belgium. Caesar alternately celebrates and skates past the genocidal brutality of this largely unnecessary war: tens (possibly hundreds) of thousands of fighters and non-combatants slaughtered outright, dozens of settlements razed, an untold number of sexual assaults, and the enslavement of countless people who couldn’t outrun the legions. As one defeated chieftain bitterly observed, “They make a desert and call it peace.” (Even purported barbarians could throw real shade.)

This was the Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic Dynasty to rule Egypt and a far cannier and clear-sighted leader than the languid femme fatale of later portrayals. Much ink has been spilled to disparage or rehabilitate her, so the truth of this remarkable woman’s life is perpetually muddied. But let’s be clear about one thing: she was not “Queen of Egypt.” She was pharaoh, like every Egyptian monarch (male or female) before her. Women exercising power in any capacity caused the Romans to break out in hives (although rarely tempered their libidos). Every formidable woman who opposed them, no matter her actual title, was dubbed “Queen” (Cleopatra, Boudicca, and Zenobia spring to mind). It strongly implied she held power derived from a man (the King) or lacked the full authority of a proper male monarch. Let’s dispense with this misogyny—Cleopatra (and the others) were rulers in their own right, sometimes acting wisely and other times falling into recklessness, just like every monarch, no matter their sex. Cleopatra was the last pharaoh, period.

Any resemblance to an unnamed presidential son-in-law is merely—yet inevitably—fortuitous. (Wait, why am I being so coy? I’m obviously talking about Jared Kushner.)

Peanuts and popcorn, the modern go-to's for inciting zoo animals, were unknown to the Romans (who mercifully never found their way to the Western Hemisphere). I must assume spectators hurled stuffed dormice or flamingo tongues instead—a Trimalchio-inspired response to dull and listless entertainment.

Nancy Pelosi’s withering assessment of Donald Trump’s “beautiful” border wall. Pelosi (indomitable and impeccably tailored former Speaker of the House, for those not following American news) suffered absolutely no fools and was herself described as “what would happen if a Glock in a Prada bag achieved sentience.” (Paraphrasing the brilliant Jon Lovett.)