The classical past could provide a new state with traditions and identity, but that identity itself would also be shaped by present goals and ambitions. Former glories might be seen to serve the present well. Several nations sought to legitimize imperial and expansionist ambitions by reference to the achievements of their ancestors.
In Greece, for example, there was the Great Idea (Megale Idea), that all Greeks should be unified in one state (Greene 2000). Given the scattered nature of the Greek community, this was problematic from the beginning, but it did act as one of the driving forces for the extension of the Greek state. This justification was put very clearly by Ioannis Kolettis, Greek prime minister from 1844 until his death in 1847:
The Kingdom of Greece is not Greece. [Greece] constitutes only one part, the smallest and poorest. A Greek is not only a man who lives within this kingdom, but also one who lives in Jannina, in Salonica, in Serres, in Adrianople, in Constantinople, in Smyrna, in Trebizond, in Crete, in Samos and in any land associated with Greek history or the Greek race. . . There are two main centers of Hellenism: Athens, the capital of the Greek kingdom, [and] “The City” [Constantinople], the dream and hope of all Greeks. (quoted and translated in Clogg 1979: 76)
This also reveals an early tension in the concept of Greek national identity, on the one hand looking back to Athens and a classical past, on the other to Constantinople and an Orthodox Christian identity. The Great Idea came to an abrupt halt in 1922 with the failure of Greek forces to occupy the region of Asia Minor around Smyrna.
The resulting debacle led to massive population transfers: some one million Greeks moved from Asia Minor to Greece, and almost 400,000 Turks went the other way, both defined by religion (Orthodox Christian or Muslim), not language. These new Greeks also helped to bolster the Greek presence in the parts of Macedonia that had been acquired in 1913 (Clogg 1979: 120-23).
The great imperial power of antiquity, of course, was Rome, and the new Italian state looked backed to it for inspiration. Thus parallels were drawn between Italy’s intervention in North Africa in 1911-12 and Scipio Africanus’s assault on Carthage at the end of the Second Punic War, the latter recaptured in one of most spectacular films of early Italian cinema, the 1914 Cabiria (Wyke 1999, Llewellyn-Jones, Hollywood’s ANCIENT WORLD, section 1). But it was Mussolini’s Fascist movement in the wake of the First World War that really took hold of Rome’s ancient past. For a country that was still very much in the process of unifying and becoming a nationstate (cf. M. Clark 1996: 177), Rome offered a national story, one that the Fascists embraced and made their own. The appeal to the past also made it easier for the Fascist regime to inaugurate radical change (cf. Quentin Skinner 1974: 294-95 on the need for every revolutionary “to march backward into battle”); it was merely the revival of the Roman empire, a return to Rome’s greatness.
The Fascist party modeled first itself and then the state after Rome. One of the most prominent symbols of Fascism and later the Italian state was the fasci, the bundle of rods (fasces in Latin) that the lictors in ancient Rome carried in front of a magistrate to represent his authority. The fasci were a very visible presence on public buildings throughout Italy. Mussolini’s sobriquet, Il Duce, harked back, sometimes explicitly so, to the Latin dux, leader (cf. fig. 48.1; Giardina and Vauchez 2000: 220-24). As the regime came to be identified with the state, so there also came into force a new system of dating, which marked the Fascist era as beginning in 1922. This was the year Mussolini, in imitation of Sulla and Caesar, came to power with his “march on Rome,” but the new calendar also defined this as the year that the fasces were restored - in other words Fascist Italy was the true successor of the Roman: 1940, for example, was the eighteenth year since the restoration of the Fasces (Anno XVIII Fascibus Restitutis). Rome becomes not merely the past but also a means of looking forward. In 1937 there was a great exhibition to celebrate two thousand years since the birth of the emperor Augustus, the Mostra Augustea della Romanitd (The Augustan Exhibition of Romanness). As the many visitors from all over Italy entered the exhibition, they would have passed through an entrance above which were written the words of Mussolini: “Italians, you must ensure the glories of Rome’s past are surpassed by the glories of the future” (Cannistraro 1972: 127).
Fascist Italy saw the re-emergence of imperial Rome, not only in exhibitions and symbols but also as a physical reality. Much of it had long disappeared beneath medieval and later structures. Mussolini stripped these away to expose the true Rome beneath, and in the process created the ancient city that tourists see today, just as the Greeks in the nineteenth century had cleared the Acropolis of post-classical buildings. This was archaeology as propaganda (Dyson 2006: 76-77, 177-79; for similar treatment of more recent monuments in nineteenth-century Paris, Colin Jones 2007). The focus of this activity was the imperial fora and the area around the Mausoleum
48.1 Mosaics from the Foro Italico, Rome, formerly the Foro Mussolini in the manner of an imperial forum. An old Roman art form, but twentieth-century Fascist themes. Note the rifles and the repeated salutation of Mussolini as II Duce. (Photo: author)
Of Augustus. Through the middle of the newly excavated imperial fora Mussolini built a huge road, essentially a parade route for military display. It ran from his headquarters in Palazzo Venezia to the Colosseum, linking the new Rome with old, and its name, Via dell’ Impero (Empire Road), captured both the achievements of the past and the aspirations of the present, although those of the present would remain largely unfulfilled (Hyde Minor 1999). They do, however, reveal the continuing vitality of the ancient world in the construction of modern national identity.
World History
