Book Description

"For an astounding two millennia-from the Etruscans of the seventh century BCE, then through the Romans under all their forms of government, indeed down to the last Byzantine dynasty-political authorities used the device known as the 'fasces' to induce respect as well as fear. This was a bundle of wooden rods and a single-bladed axe bound with leather straps-in essence, a mobile kit for punishment. In the Renaissance, some writers and artists found it irresistable to associate the fasces with an old (and unrelated) didactic tale from Aesop illustrating how sticks are stronger once bundled. And so, over the course of the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the Roman emblem came to represent not just expected concepts such as power, punishment, and justice, but now also strength, unity, and liberty against tyranny. The "Fascist" movement of Benito Mussolini, which seized power in Italy in October 1922, purported to revive the Roman emblem in its original form. But it retained aspects of the modern reimagining of the fasces, and introduced still further novelties, such as glorification of the 'lictors', the lowly attendants who carried the fasces in antiquity. Since World War II, the fasces has seen widespread but uneven eradication, in the context of a public that has grown progressively unconversant with the symbol. It is precisely the fasces' long history and relative present-day unfamiliarity that has given an opening to right-wing extremists searching for a symbol that is potent, but not widely provocative at first glance"--