"The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire"

Dave Barry’s observation that “The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire” turns a wry lens upon the passage of time and the way society categorizes eras. There’s a tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition here, comparing a decade still within living memory to a civilization that fell over a thousand years ago. The Roman Empire evokes images of togas, legions, and marble ruins: a span of history so far removed from daily life that it feels almost mythological. By equating this with the 1960s, Barry points to a peculiar process: contemporary experiences and vibrant realities gradually become rosily remote, detached from the present, and subject to the same sort of iconography that characterizes antiquity.

What’s at play is the cultural tendency to compress complex times into packages of nostalgia and collective memory. The 1960s, with its turbulence, optimism, and upheaval, civil rights, Vietnam, counterculture, moon landings, was once lived viscerally by millions. Now, as decades pass, even those who lived through the Sixties see their memories filtered through documentaries, museum exhibits, and school lessons. Younger generations approach the era the way they do the Roman Empire: interpreting symbols, artifacts, and narratives shaped by those who came before. Tie-dye shirts and antiwar protests become as much costume and tableau as togas and gladiatorial games.

Barry’s analogy also provides a gently comic reminder of aging and generational distance. People who personally experienced Woodstock or the Summer of Love now find their youth cordoned off as “history,” examined by scholars and trivial pursuit games, crystallized into a few headline events and familiar songs. What once felt new, radical, or threatening has entered the museum of accepted cultural myth, subject to revision, summary, and stereotype.

Ultimately, the joke veils something poignant. All eras eventually slip from lived reality into the grand display case of history. What’s everyday today will, in time, share a shelf in the collective imagination, Roman columns beside lava lamps, emperors beside Beatles albums. The playfulness of Barry’s comparison underscores how swiftly immediacy fades to legacy, and how every generation’s present eventually becomes distantly historical.