Roman salute
The Roman salute, also known as the fascist salute, is a gesture in which the right hand is swung from the left shoulder to fully extend the right arm forward perpendicular to the torso, with palm down, and fingers touching. In some versions, the arm is raised upward at an angle; in others, it is held out parallel to the ground. In contemporary times, the gesture is typically associated with fascism and far-right politics. Although it originated during the 18th century in France, it is pseudohistorically associated with ancient Rome.
According to an apocryphal legend, the fascist gesture was based on a customary greeting which was claimed to have been used in ancient Rome. However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern "Roman" salute. The salute had in fact originated more than a millennium later, in Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii, and it quickly developed a historically inaccurate association with Roman republican and imperial culture. The gesture and its identification with Roman culture were further developed in other neoclassic artworks. In the United States, a similar salute for the Pledge of Allegiance known as the Bellamy salute was created by James B. Upham to accompany the Pledge, written by Francis Bellamy in 1892. The gesture was further elaborated upon in popular culture during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in plays and films that portrayed the salute as an ancient Roman custom. These included the 1914 Italian film Cabiria whose intertitles were written by the nationalist poet Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1919, d'Annunzio adopted the cinematographically depicted salute as a neo-imperial ritual when he led an occupation of Fiume.
Through d'Annunzio's influence, the gesture soon became part of the rising Italian Fascist movement's symbolic repertoire and began to be gradually adopted by the Fascist regime in 1923. It was additionally adopted by the Nazi Party in Germany in 1926, where it was used with the "Sieg Heil!" chant as part of the Nazi salute, gaining national prominence with the Nazi regime that began in 1933. During the interwar period, the Roman salute was also adopted by other fascist, far right, and ultranationalist movements, including Francoist Spain and Metaxist Greece. The gesture fell out of use after the end of World War II, which included the defeat of the Axis powers that made compulsory use of it. Since then, displaying the salute with a Nazi intent has been a criminal offence in Germany, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia, and Poland. Legal restrictions on its use in Italy are more nuanced and use there has generated controversy.
The Roman salute gesture and its variations continue to be used today in neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, and Falangist contexts. Outside of these, it is used officially in Mexico as a civilian, military and political pledge of allegiance, in countries including Portugal, Brazil and Chile only as a military oath, and in Taiwan strictly as an oath of office.
Ancient Roman greeting gestures
The modern gesture consists of stiffly extending the right arm frontally and raising it roughly 135 degrees from the body's vertical axis, with the palm of the hand facing down and the fingers stretched out and touching each other. According to a pseudo-historical legend, this salute was based on an ancient Roman custom. However, this description is not found in Roman literature and is never mentioned by ancient Roman historians. Not a single Roman work of art displays a salute of this kind. The gesture of the raised right arm or hand in Roman and other ancient cultures that does exist in surviving literature and art generally had a significantly different function and is never identical with the modern straight-arm salute.The right hand was commonly used in antiquity in gestures symbolic of a pledge of trust, friendship, or loyalty. For example, Cicero reported that Octavian pledged an oath to Julius Caesar while outstretching his right hand: "Although that youth is powerful and has told Antony off nicely: yet, after all, we must wait to see the end. But what a speech! He swore his oath with the words: 'so may I achieve the honours of my father!', and at the same time he stretched out his right hand in the direction of his statue."
Sculptures commemorating military victories such as those on the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Constantine, or on the Column of Trajan are the best-known examples of raised arms in the art of that period. However, these monuments do not display a single representation of the Roman salute.
The images closest in appearance to a raised arm salute are scenes in Roman sculpture and coins which show an adlocutio, acclamatio, adventus, or profectio. These are occasions when a high-ranking official, such as a general or the emperor, addresses individuals or a group, often soldiers. Unlike modern custom, in which both the leader and the people he addresses raise their arms, most of these scenes show only the senior official raising his hand. Occasionally it is a sign of greeting or benevolence, but usually it is used as an indication of power. An opposite depiction is the salutatio of a diogmites, a military police officer, who raises his right arm to greet his commander during his adventus on a relief from 2nd-century Ephesus.
An example of a salutational gesture of imperial power can be seen in the statue of Augustus of Prima Porta which follows certain guidelines set out by oratory scholars of his day. In Rhetorica ad Herennium the anonymous author states that the orator "will control himself in the entire frame of his body and in the manly angle of his flanks, with the extension of the arm in the impassioned moments of speech, and by drawing in the arm in relaxed moods". Quintilian states in his Institutio Oratoria: "Experts do not permit the hand to be raised above the level of the eyes or lowered beneath the breast; to such a degree is this true that it is considered a fault to direct the hand above the head or lower it to the lower part of the belly. It may be extended to the left within the limits of the shoulder, but beyond that it is not fitting."
Modern invention of the salute
18th–19th centuries France
Beginning with Jacques-Louis David's painting The Oath of the Horatii, an association of the gesture with Roman republican and imperial culture emerged. The painting shows the three sons of Horatius swear on their swords, held by their father, that they will defend Rome to the death. It is based on a historical event described by Livy and elaborated by Dionysius in Roman Antiquities. However, the moment depicted in David's painting is his own creation. Neither Livy nor Dionysius mention any oath taking episode. Dionysius, the more detailed source, reports that the father had left to his sons the decision to fight then raised his hands to the heavens to thank the gods.Dominating the center of The Oath of the Horatii is the brothers' father, facing left. He has both hands raised. His left hand is holding three swords, while his right hand is empty, with fingers stretched but not touching. The brother closest to the viewer is holding his arm almost horizontally. The brother on the left is holding his arm slightly higher, while the third brother holds his hand higher still. While the first brother extends his right arm, the other two are extending their left arms. The succession of arms raised progressively higher leads to a gesture closely approximating the style used by fascists in the 20th century in Italy, albeit with the "wrong" arms.
Art historian Albert Boime provides the following analysis:
After the French Revolution of 1789, David was commissioned to depict the formation of the revolutionary government in a similar style. In the Tennis Court Oath the National Assembly are all depicted with their arms outstretched, united in an upward gesture comparable to that of the Horatii, as they swear to create a new constitution. The painting was never finished, but an immense drawing was exhibited in 1791 alongside the Oath of the Horatii. As in the Oath of the Horatii, David conveys the unity of minds and bodies in the service of the patriotic ideal. But in this drawing, he takes the subject further, uniting the people beyond just family ties and across different classes, religions, and philosophical opinions.
After the republican government was replaced by Napoleon's imperial régime, David further deployed the gesture in The Distribution of the Eagle Standards. But unlike his previous paintings representing republican ideals, in Eagle Standards the oath of allegiance is pledged to a central authority figure, and in imperial fashion. Boime sees the series of oath pictures as "the coding of key developments in the history of the Revolution and its culmination in Napoleonic authoritarianism".
The imperial oath is seen in other paintings, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme's Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant of 1859. In this painting, the gladiators are all raising their right or left arms, holding tridents and other weapons. Their salutation is a well-known Latin phrase quoted in Suetonius, De Vita Caesarum. Despite becoming widely popularised in later times, the phrase is unknown in Roman history aside from this isolated use, and it is questionable whether it was ever a customary salute, as is often believed. It was more likely to be an isolated appeal by desperate captives and criminals condemned to die.
19th–20th centuries United States
On October 12, 1892, the Bellamy salute was demonstrated as the hand gesture to accompany the Pledge of Allegiance in the United States. The inventor of the saluting gesture was James B. Upham, junior partner and editor of The Youth's Companion. Bellamy recalled Upham, upon reading the pledge, came into the posture of the salute, snapped his heels together, and said "Now up there is the flag; I come to salute; as I say 'I pledge allegiance to my flag,' I stretch out my right hand and keep it raised while I say the stirring words that follow."As fascism took hold in Europe, controversy grew over the use of the Bellamy salute given its similarity to the Roman Salute. When war broke out in 1939, the controversy intensified. School boards around the country revised the salute to avoid the similarity. There was a counter-backlash from the United States Flag Association and the Daughters of the American Revolution, who felt it inappropriate for Americans to have to change the traditional salute because others had later adopted a similar gesture.
On June 22, 1942, at the urging of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Congress passed Public Law 77-623, which codified the etiquette used to display and pledge allegiance to the flag. This included use of the Bellamy salute, specifically that the pledge "be rendered by standing with the right hand over the heart; extending the right hand, palm upward, toward the flag at the words 'to the flag' and holding this position until the end, when the hand drops to the side." Congress did not discuss or take into account the controversy over use of the salute. Congress later amended the code on December 22, 1942, when it passed Public Law 77-829. Among other changes, it eliminated the Bellamy salute and replaced it with the stipulation that the pledge "be rendered by standing with the right hand over the heart".