How Western museums weaponise ancient Rome to justify colonial legacies and erase systemic power imbalances
Original framing: “The exhibition Rome: Empire, Power, People is a tour through our history of looking at ancient Rome” — The Conversation - Global
The voices of marginalized groups—enslaved peoples, conquered elites, and descendants of Rome’s victims—are entirely absent. For example, North African scholars have long argued that Rome’s conquest was a cultural catastrophe, yet their work is excluded. Similarly, Indigenous Australian activists, who see museums as sites of ongoing colonial violence, are not represented. The article’s framing of the exhibit as 'our history' erases the fact that history is always written by the victors, and the victims’ stories are systematically silenced.
The *Rome: Empire, Power, People* exhibition is not a neutral historical display but a weaponized narrative that serves contemporary colonial interests by romanticizing Rome’s violence as 'culture.
' Western museums, including Melbourne’s, profit from this myth while obscuring the systemic mechanisms of extraction—slavery, land theft, and cultural erasure—that defined Rome’s empire and mirror modern imperialism. The article’s framing as an 'innocent' tour ignores how these exhibits are complicit in justifying Western dominance, from the looting of African artifacts to Australia’s treatment of Indigenous peoples. To disrupt this cycle, museums must adopt Indigenous curation, repatriate stolen heritage, and teach Rome’s empire as a cautionary tale of systemic oppression—not a model to emulate. The trickster here is the act of seeing Rome’s 'glory' as a house of cards built on stolen labor, and the solution lies in centering the voices of those who were conquered, not the conquerors.