Could I find love at the British Museum?

Mirabile dictu, as we Latin lovers like to say. In other words, wonderful news! Attractive women have fallen for ancient Rome – and for classicists.

Well, that’s what the British Museum thought when it cooked up its advertising campaign for its new show, Legion: Life in the Roman Army, about Roman legionaries. The Museum put up a controversial social media post, promoting the exhibition as an opportunity for single women to find single men.

The post read: ‘Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition, Life in the Roman Army, and walk around looking confused. You’re welcome x.’ It added: ‘Come for the Romans, stay for some romance.’

The museum said the post was a reference to the viral TikTok trend of women asking their boyfriends, husbands and fathers how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The video has now been deleted after women objected to its sexism.

But in the Socratic spirit of curiosity, I set off for the museum to see whether it was true: do male classicists exert an irresistible magnetism on female Latin lovers?

The setting of the show is suitably romantic. I plumped for the last slot of the day, when the tourists flee to the gift shop and only the passionate classicists remain. The exhibition is drowned in sepulchral gloom – perfect for illicit assignations in hidden corners. It’s nearly quiet, apart from the crunch-crunch audio track of legionaries marching – more like someone munching their way through an unending bowl of bran flakes, my friend Quentin Letts says.

All the same, as soon as I entered the show, bingo! There, standing alone, was a trim thirtysomething woman with a fashionable, cropped haircut, like Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle.