It is astounding that no one has written a complete history of the fasces from antiquity to the present before B. His fascinating (pun intended) account of how this emblem of power has shifted meanings over time and in different national contexts shows why. Since each context has its own logic and conventions, it had not seemed necessary to link them. By doing so, B. reveals under-examined connections over time that illuminate the actual and notional role of force in exercising power. This is already an important contribution. Additionally, his paradigmatic case study shows how radically the meaning of symbols may change in reception. Using iconography, conceptual, cultural and social history, this book tells an eye-opening story about ideology.
The basic story is one of conflation. In its first phase the original Roman fasces had a pragmatic as well as a symbolic function. The lictors who bore them in different numbers before different magistrates represented the power of governmental agents to inflict corporal punishment. They caused terror by beating citizens and subjects with the rods and beheading them with the axes, within certain limits. Although images of fasces in late antiquity show them becoming taller and thinner, suggesting a decrease in use while their symbolic value persisted, their meaning remained stable in ancient Rome broadly construed.
When the symbol was later revived, after abeyance during medieval times, the bundle was associated with Aesop's fable (Babrius 47; Perry index 53) about a father using bound sticks as an allegory of unity to his sons. Each stick was easily broken individually, but together they held firm. The lesson: if the sons stay together, they will withstand external aggression. Alone, each will fall. By now, the fasces had become entirely symbolic. Their association with just power edges out the Roman emphasis on force. At various points their depiction increases, notably in France. With the American and French revolutions, it snowballs. The message of unity underlies their prominence in American iconography as an icon of federal strength. They become particularly frequent in representations of George Washington, standing for the confederation of the thirteen colonies, then of Abraham Lincoln, standing for the Union against secession.
In the fasces’ third major iteration, Benito Mussolini adopted them as the symbol for his party, allegedly guided by Gabriele D'Annunzio, whose grounding in cinema gave him a canny sense of gesture. This is another instance of semantic adaptation. Previously, ‘bundle’ (fascio) served as a metaphor for small-scale organisations (‘a home-front women's association’, p. 178). The Fascisti, however, revived the emblem's earlier Roman association with force, in addition to its role as a symbol of Italian unification. In all modern instances they convey state-enforced justice and authority. The defeat of fascism in the Second World War, however, discredited the symbol. In one of the most surprising twists in its history, the fasces have now become illegible to the public, so much so that right-wing white supremacists have started to adopt this symbol again. Less provocative than the Nazi swastika, the fasces now slip under the radar. Plausible deniability lets extremists claim they are channelling Washington rather than Mussolini (p. 217).
B. tells this story with much nuance. The introduction lays out the basic arc. The chapters survey historical details, analysing instance after instance of stories and images from ancient Rome to the present. The cases, however, never overwhelm the larger picture. If ever I started skimming, B.'s gripping prose drew me back in. He has a knack for distilling complex history into brief summaries that will make the book accessible to non-specialists. On the conflict of the orders: ‘Livy and Dionysius offer their readers the picture of a near-intractable power struggle between patricians and plebeians that starts in earnest in the year 476 bce’ (p. 74). He sums up the invention of ‘lesser imperium’ and the praetorship in 366 bce ‘as part of a complex political and social compromise between Rome's patricians and the emerging plebeian nobility’ (p. 34). If you want more, there is abundant bibliography – on this issue see B.'s The Praetorship in the Roman Republic (2000). Clever, concise turns of phrase cause delight. Beyond bursting into private houses to conduct searches or make arrests, lictors could ‘intervene in the public market, by destroying overpriced fish’ (p. 71). The occasional pun amuses: ‘The fasces-branded cigarettes were rolled out that year’ (p. 187). The sign of true insight is to notice what is missing, here, the lack of fasces on Augustan and Tiberian coinage.
The cases serve a larger political purpose: to render legible the danger of the fasces as a symbol (p. 217). The extent of Roman violence against its own subjects and citizens becomes overwhelming through countless examples. B.'s stress on the increasing number of lictors in the city of Rome over time gives a sense of how uncomfortable it felt to walk in the street. No matter how well-informed you may be, the cumulative effect of reading so many vivid stories of beatings and beheadings is nauseating. Although Roman violence recedes from view when the stress on unity becomes dominant and the lictors disappear, the earlier meaning could be accessed for ideological purposes. Jefferson Davis objected to the fasces on Thomas Crawford's original proposal for the statue depicting Liberty on the dome of the Capitol, because the Roman associations of the ‘lictor's rods’ still carried the threat of corporal punishment, even though the contemporary ‘general understanding of the symbol’ was of strength through unity (p. 167). His objection obliquely protested the Union itself. Crawford moved the fasces to a less prominent place, but kept them in the design.
Mussolini's revival of the fasces restored an aspect central to their Roman meaning that had become latent – or at least displaced into notions of just rule. The rods and axes backed up his and his party's stress on action. Small details in iconography carry great weight. Loosened cords imply the rods were ‘being readied for punitive use’ (p. 180). When unity was emphasized, the axe could disappear or be minimised into a decorative feature. Now the axe became prominent again in this new ideological twist. Archaeologists, who reconstructed the origins and ancient appearance of the fasces, supported Mussolini's revitalisation of ancient Roman ideas about using force together with their symbols.
B.'s social history of the lictors left me wondering about overlap with and distinction from official weapon-wielders in modernity. As the enforcers of the violence that a magistrate could command, lictors were more disciplinary than protective, although they could also protect. Given the lack of an ancient police force – in Rome, the praetorian guard's job was more to defend the powerful than to enforce general order – were the lictors more like the Secret Service or the police? The lictors were not technically soldiers like the praetorians. Did shifting lines between the military and the police in modernity matter when the fasces became strictly symbolic? How does a symbol strike terror when it represents a defunct weapon?
To write this profoundly learned page-turner, B. has delved deeply into primary sources for modernity as well as antiquity. Analysis of rejected initial plans for monuments is an especially rich source for tracing ideological struggles. Although he relies more on others’ scholarship for the areas outside his primary field of expertise, B. is a veritable bloodhound for tracking down materials. Perhaps the most surprising monument is on Princeton's campus. Alexander Stoddart's historicist sculpture of John Knox Witherspoon (2001) drew criticism not because this eighteenth-century president of the university leans on a set of columnar fasces, including a visual pun on the axe, but because he owned enslaved persons. Surely a twenty-first-century sculptor could find visual language for critique.
B.'s classic will be admired by the general educated public as well as scholars. The astonishment and horror it elicits support the book's main purpose, to shake us out of complacency. No one will have an excuse now for ignoring the implications of this potent symbol.
