Fascism’s Obsession with Ancient Rome

By Ryan Beitler

When Benito Mussolini started his National Fascist Party in 1919, he promised Italians he would make Italy great again—great like the time of the Ancient Roman Empire. To hark back to this era of imperialism, Roman identity, and national pride has been a constant theme in the history of fascism.

From Mussolini to Hitler to Franco to the alt-right, every fascist movement has romanticized and appropriated the brutal history of Ancient Rome, its dictatorships, and its dominion of both people they enslaved and the world at large.

Even the movement’s most characteristic symbol, the fascio littorio, a bundle of sticks with an axe, comes from Ancient Rome, the icon acting as a metaphor for the ideology. In fascism, it is said that one stick is weak, but together the bundle of sticks—the state—is strong.

For Ancient Romans, the fascio littorio was a symbol of power. But for fascists and white supremacists from Benito Mussolini to Richard Spencer, the empire of Ancient Rome is itself that symbol of genetic superiority.

“To celebrate the Birth of Rome,” Mussolini proclaimed in 1922 after his infamous March on Rome, “means to celebrate our kind of civilization, means to exalt our history and our race, means to lean firmly on the past in order to project better onto the future . . . Much of what was the immortal spirit of Rome is reborn in fascism.”

Adolf Hitler was as equally enamored with classical Rome. As a young man, Hitler had been interested in Greek and Roman culture and architecture. To the person who would be the dictator of Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire was a symbol of white supremacy—what he called the “master race”—evidence that white Europeans were indeed superior. This vision, a distortion of history, would become a model for the Third Reich.

“Without the Classical tradition, the Nazi visual ideology would have been rather different,” Michael Schneider, professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, told the BBC referring to a Greek statute Hitler was so enthralled with that he purchased it. “The perfect Aryan body, the white color, the beautiful, ideal white male: to put it very bluntly, it became a kind of image of the Herrenrasse, or ‘master race.'”

Richard Spencer is a contemporary example of the vanity associated with Ancient Rome. Like Hitler and Mussolini, Spencer reveres the ideal man depicted in Roman and Greek statues. Furthermore, he uses this ideal and notion of superiority in his personal marketing. He and his followers make a point to be physically fit and dress well as a way of showing that white people are, in their view, superior.

In an interview with Kamau Bell on CNN, Spencer joyously claimed that he would like to “bathe in white privilege,” saying that one reason white privilege is great is because the “people are good looking.”

It isn’t just the Roman concept of the ideal man through Hitler’s vision of the master race Spencer identifies with. He has repeatedly said that his dystopian vision of a white-ethno state in America would be a “reviving the Roman Empire,” a place where whites would thrive and conquer through a ban on all non-white immigration for fifty years, a policy he dreams would facilitate a “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”

Much like fascists before him, Spencer sees this idea as a “safe place” for whites, a place for them to come together and dominate the world.

When defending the infamous “sieg heil” Nazi salutes t the National Policy Institute convention caught on video by The Atlantic, Spencer called the gesture a “Roman salute.” He is right insofar that the salute can be traced back to Ancient Rome, but after being adopted by Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, it is saturated with ethnic cleansing, human rights abuses, and genocide. It is through fascist symbols like flimsy sticks creating a durable bundle and a salute adopted by the Nazis while exterminating 6 million Jews and 5 million others that fascists long to relive the Roman Empire.

Another group deifying Ancient Rome is the white supremacist organization Identity Evropa. The well-dressed protégés of Spencer are an organization of young white nationalists known for posting fliers at college campuses around the country. On the fliers, Identity Evropa tells white students to “become who you are,” telling them they should “become great again,” protect their heritage, and determine their own historical destiny, all while depicting symbols and statues of Greek and Roman Empire.

Spencer and his followers see Ancient Rome as a golden era when whites dominated the planet, it isn’t a stretch to say they long to relive slavery, segregation, deportation, and genocide. And while Romans, who were undoubtedly slave-owners, didn’t see race as the defining aspect of their empire, fascists who glorify this history don’t seem to know that Rome was a Republic before it was an Empire that encompassed North Africa, that the king of that Empire was once a Libyan Moor, and that the way Ancient Romans thought about race was completely different than the way we think about it today.

In the time of Ancient Rome, race did not determine class or social status of a person. Neither did the concept determine who became a slave and who didn’t.

“To interpret adverse Roman comments on alien phenotypes in that way . . .” writes Nigerian scholar and classicist Lloyd A. Thompson, “is merely to engage in a crudely anachronistic transfer of particular modern values to Roman society; for it is very clear that, unlike the situation in certain modern societies, physiognomy did not function as a criterion of social status in the Roman system of stratification.”

This isn’t to say that slavery during the Roman Empire wasn’t brutal. On the contrary, it was so vicious that it didn’t exclude any person from slavery on the basis of race. Though racial bias must have played a role in Roman slavery, slave-owners are always interested in the origin of the slave, it was simply not the way the institution was organized.

Most slaves in Ancient Rome were foreigners. They could be sailors, pirates, and others bought from outside Roman territory. While foreign slaves could be brought in from elsewhere, it was possible that black North Africans could’ve been slave-owners. While black and brown people definitely ended up as victims of slavery during the Ancient Roman Empire, they were there working and suffering next to others of every skin color.

Still, despite the differences in the way Romans engaged with race, Ancient Rome is not an incompatible symbol for fascists. If they are looking for a period when whites ruled over the planet, they needn’t look further than Ancient Rome. It just that the fascists who romanticize the cruelty of dictatorship and empire prefer to focus on the aspects of history that benefit their racist narrative when, in reality, the Romans didn’t think of their Empire as a white-ethno state.

Fascist’s obsession with Ancient Rome, the history behind its symbols, and the reasons that contemporary fascism clings onto ancient history is because, of course, they are running out of idols and symbols of “white greatness.” They can no longer deify Hitler, or Mussolini, or Franco and expect to garner new recruits. Racism is doing what it has always done: avoiding the truth behind its ugly ideas.

By reconciling with this history and learning from it, we can work to nullify the antiquated notion that Ancient Rome is a symbol of white greatness and study not just the accomplishments, but the brutality behind the veil of the racial vanity of white supremacy.

Ryan Beitler is a journalist, fiction writer, traveler, musician, and blogger. He has recently written for Paste Magazine, Addiction Now, Our Little Blue Rock, and OC Weekly.