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 (1784), 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 (and without fascist intents) 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.

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 (Lat. dextera, dextra; Gr. δεξιά – dexia) 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 [the young Caesar Octavian] 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.