For one thing, the gesture that is shown in Roman sculptures like the Augustus of Prima Porta is clearly a loose gesture with the elbow slightly bent, the palm facing perpendicular to the ground, and the fingers not fully extended. This gesture, however, differs in both form and significance from the straight-armed salute that is so often attributed to the Romans. As a result of the changes to the right arm and hand that were made during the repairs, the statue now shows the emperor with his right arm outstretched to his side and the fingers on his right hand seemingly in the process of unfurling.ĪBOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Augustus of Prima Porta, showing Augustus making a hortatory gesture with his right hand Winkler notes that the Augustus of Prima Porta seems to have originally depicted the emperor holding a spear, but the statue was broken at some point and repaired in antiquity. One such example is the Augustus of Prima Porta, a very famous marble statue depicting the Roman emperor Augustus that was most likely commissioned by Augustus’s wife Livia at some point between his death in 14 CE and her own death in 29 CE. This gesture is not clearly depicted in any surviving work of Roman art, nor is it clearly referenced in any surviving work of Roman literature.Īs Winkler discusses in his book, however, there are many surviving works of ancient Roman art that depict men in positions of power making a gesture that kind of vaguely resembles the straight-arm salute. There is no clear evidence to suggest that the ancient Romans ever used the straight-arm salute with the palm facing down that is so often attributed to them. Winkler, published in 2009 by Ohio State University Press Most of the remaining portions of this article, which discuss the history of the Roman salute, are based primarily on chapters two through five of Winkler’s book (spanning pages 42–121).ĪBOVE: Cover of the book The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology by Martin M. The first sections of this article, which discuss ancient Roman gestures that resemble the straight-arm salute, are based primarily on Winkler’s first chapter (spanning pages 17–41). The entire book is available online for free in PDF format through Project Muse, so, if you want to read the book for yourself, it should be easily accessible for you to do so. Winkler has written multiple books dealing with the reception of classical antiquity in the modern world, particularly in films, and his book is more-or-less the definitive history of the straight-arm salute that eventually became used by the Nazis. Winkler, who is currently a professor of the classics at George Mason University, and published by Ohio State University Press in 2009. Most of the information that I will be discussing in this article is based on research that comes from the book The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology, which was written by the scholar Martin M. The Nazis, in turn, adopted it from the Italian Fascists. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became incorporated into numerous stage plays and films set in ancient Rome, leading the Italian Fascists to adopt it, believing that it was Roman. The salute’s traceable history begins with a late eighteenth-century French Neoclassical painter. The true origins of the Nazi salute are far more strange. There is, however, no evidence that anyone in ancient Rome ever used the form of the straight-arm salute that was used by the Italian Fascists and German Nazis. Various modern-day fascists and Neo-Nazis have tried to do the same thing. The Italian Fascists and the German Nazis both believed that this salute originated with the ancient Romans and tried to use the salute’s supposed Roman origins in order to bolster their own prestige and portray themselves as continuing the Roman legacy. In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the National Fascist Party (i.e., the PNF) in Italy and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (i.e., the NSDAP or Nazi Party) in Germany both used a salute that consisted of a straight, rigid arm raised into the air above the shoulders with the hand parallel to the rest of the arm and the palm facing toward the ground.
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