No one takes the Rome-never-happened person seriously on account of her being so ludicrous and thin-skinned. But it’ll only take someone charismatic and superficially reasonable to jump her grift and I’ll be spending my final years being mocked by midwits for believing Ovid wasn’t Stephanie Harris or Zack Snyder or whatever.

And it’ll be my own fault. As an (admittedly) lapsed classicist I should have took a stand when they shouted at palaeontologists that evolution wasn’t real. I should have took a stand when they mocked archaeologists for saying pyramids weren’t built by aliens or Atlantis but by our ingenious and perfectly capable (and non-white) human forebears. But I didn’t. I sat on my smug classical ass and chortled and ate pies.

Reality is increasingly getting a bad rap and expertise is seen as just a breed of duplicity. Bullshitters strut glorious and unchecked, hailed on podcasts and caressed by streaming services. They will suck the light out of this world.

If we let ‘em.