A fasces (; ; a , from the Latin word , meaning 'bundle'; ) is a bound bundle of wooden rods, often, but not always, including an axe (occasionally two axes) with its blade emerging. The fasces is an Italian symbol that had its origin in the Etruscan civilization and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolized a Roman king's power to punish his subjects, and later, a magistrate's power and jurisdiction. The axe has its own separate and older origin. Initially associated with the labrys (; ), the double-bitted axe, originally from Crete, is one of the oldest symbols of Greek civilization.
The image of fasces has survived in the modern world as a representation of magisterial power, law, and governance. The fasces frequently occurs as a charge in heraldry: it is present on the reverse of the U.S. Mercury dime coin and it was the origin of the name of the National Fascist Party in Italy (from which the term fascism is derived).
During the first half of the twentieth century, both the fasces and the swastika (each symbol having its own unique ancient religious and mythological associations) became heavily identified with the fascist political movements of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. This is due to Mussolini's more active usage of the symbol and the campaigns of Hitler, Nazis, and anti-fascists alike to make various allusions and comparisons between the two dictators to associate Hitler with Mussolini and his symbolism. During this period, the swastika became deeply stigmatized, but the fasces did not undergo a similar process outside of Italy.
The fasces remained in use in many societies after World War II because it had already been adopted and incorporated into the iconography of numerous governments outside of Italy prior to Mussolini. Such iconographical use persists in governmental and various other contexts. In contrast, the swastika remains in common usage only in Asia, where it originated as an ancient South Asian symbol, and in Navajo iconography, where its religious significance is entirely unrelated to, and predates, early 20th-century European fascism.
Symbolism
The fasces, as a bundle of rods with an axe, was a grouping of all the equipment needed to inflict corporal or capital punishment. In ancient Rome, the bundle was a material symbol of a Roman magistrate's full civil and military power, known as . They were carried in a procession with a magistrate by lictors, who carried the fasces and, at times, used the birch rods as punishment to enforce obedience with magisterial commands. In common language and literature, the fasces were regularly associated with certain offices: praetors were referred to in Greek as the (), and the consuls were referred to as "the twelve fasces" as literary metonymy. Beyond serving as insignia of office, it also symbolised the Roman Republic and its prestige.
After the classical period and with the fall of the Roman state, thinkers were removed from the "psychological terror generated by the original Roman fasces" in the antique period. By the Renaissance, there emerged a conflation of the fasces with a Greek fable first recorded by Babrius in the second century AD, which depicted how individual sticks can be easily broken but a bundle could not. This story is common across Eurasian culture and by the thirteenth century AD was recorded in the Secret History of the Mongols. While there is no historical connection between the original fasces and this fable, by the sixteenth century AD, fasces were "inextricably linked" with interpretations of the fable as one expressing unity and harmony.
In the ancient world
Origin The English word fasces comes from Latin, with singular . The word is usually used in its plural to refer to magisterial insignia, but is sometimes used to refer to bushels or bundles in an agricultural context. This word itself comes from the Indo-European root , referring to a bundle.
The earliest archaeological remains of a fasces are those discovered in a necropolis near the Etruscan hamlet now called Vetulonia by the archaeologist Isidoro Falchi in 1897. The discovery is now dated to the relatively narrow range of 630–625 BC, which coincides with the traditional dating of Rome's legendary fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. An Etruscan origin, furthermore, is supported by ancient literary evidence: the poet Silius Italicus, who flourished in the late 1st century AD, posited that Rome adopted many of its emblems of office – viz the fasces, the curule chair, and the – specifically from Vetulonia. A story of Etruscan origin is further supported by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his antiquarian work, Roman Antiquities.
Rome
Regal period Ancient Roman literary sources are unanimous in describing the ancient kings of Rome as being accompanied by twelve lictors carrying fasces. Dionysius, in Roman Antiquities, gave a complex story explaining this number: for him, the practice originated in Etruria, and each bundle symbolised one of the twelve Etruscan city-states; the twelve states together represented a joint military campaign, and were given to the Etruscan king of Rome, Tarquinius Priscus, on his accession to the throne. While Livy concurred with Dionysius' story, he also relates a different story ascribing fasces to the first Roman king, Romulus, who selected twelve to correspond to the twelve birds which appeared in augury at the founding of Rome.
Later stories gave different aetiologies: some described fasces as coming from Latium, others from Italy in general. Macrobius, writing in the 5th century AD, has the Romans taking fasces from the Etruscans as spoils of war rather than adopted by cultural diffusion. In general, it seems that by the sixth century BC, fasces had become a common symbol in central Italy and Etruria – if not also into southern Italy, as Livy implies – for royal prestige and coercive power. The ancient Roman literary record largely depicts the fasces of their time as carried largely symbolically by lictors who were present primarily to defend their charges from violence. However, the same stories depict fasces far more negatively in the context of tyrannies or regal displays.
Plutarch, in his Life of Publicola, describes an incident in which Lucius Junius Brutus, the first Roman consul, has lictors scourge with rods and decapitate with axes – components of the fasces – his own sons, who were conspiring to restore the Tarquins to the throne., citing Plut. Pub. 6. After Brutus' alleged death in battle, Publicola then passed reforms subordinating magisterial use of fasces for coercion to the people: consuls would lower the fasces before the people during speeches, and there would be appeal to the people against a magistrate ordering capital or corporal punishment.
Republican period
During the republic, the Romans used the number of fasces accompanying a magistrate to mark out rank and distinction. The two consuls each had 12 lictors, as did the traditional dictators. The late republican dictators (of which Sulla was the first) were accompanied by 24 lictors and fasces., adding that Julius Caesar during his dictatorship, was voted 72 fasces for his triumphs, but also noting that this backfired politically. However, the consuls alternated initiative by month. The consul without initiative would retain a veto on the other consul's actions, but would be preceded only by an and be followed by lictors bearing reduced fasces.
Praetors normally held six fasces and were so described on campaign in Greek sources. There were, however, some exceptions. After 197 BC, praetors sent to Hispania were dispatched with proconsular status and therefore received twelve fasces. Around the same time, in the , the number of fasces accompanying a praetor in court was reduced to merely two, possibly because a praetor in court "with six fasces might seem imperious".
By the late second century BC, magistrates who had won victories abroad that were proclaimed , a victory title, were decorated with laurel. This acclamation was a necessary prerequisite for celebrating a triumph, a prestigious award for which commanders might wait years. Within the , Rome's sacred city boundary, the magistrates normally removed the axes from their fasces to symbolise the appealable nature of their civic powers. However, an exception was made during a triumph, when the triumphing general's military auspices were extended into the city, so that he could make sacrifices at the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. The laurels decorating the triumphator's axed fasces were removed and decided in a ceremony, placing them in the lap of the cult statue of the Capitoline Jupiter.
During the republic, only persons possessing were granted full complements of fasces; the number granted to promagistrates for their analogous rank was not diminished. Lieutenants exercising delegated were, in the late republic, regularly granted two fasces. When others were sometimes assigned lictors as bodyguards or otherwise to assist in official duties, they probably did not carry fasces. Italian municipal officials during the republic were usually accompanied by local lictors, but these lictors did not carry fasces until imperial times.
Popular resistance to magistrates during the late republic sometimes took the form of mobs smashing magisterial fasces. In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus incited a mob to take and break a praetor's fasces; two praetors, a certain Brutus and Servilius, were dispatched in 88 BC to order Lucius Cornelius Sulla, then consul, to desist from his march on Rome, and had their insignia of office defaced and destroyed; Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus's lictors were set upon in 59 BC when he, along with some plebeian tribunes, attempted to veto Julius Caesar's land reform bill during their joint consulship, leading to his lictors' fasces being lost entirely. This last breaking of fasces was "a ritualistic act of symbolic violence (the People thus disposing of tokens of the imperium that was in their gift) that substituted for direct physical violence against the person of the consul".
Imperial period
During the Roman Empire, the number of people who were entitled to fasces and lictors expanded. Fasces were first granted to Vestal Virgins by the Senate in 42 BC, when the six vestals were allowed one lictor each. They were joined by fasces granted to the three major (high priests). Single lictors also preceded members of the , who were priests of the imperial cult. At the death of the first emperor, Augustus, in AD 14, his widow, Livia, was voted a lictor by the Senate, though sources disagree as to whether she ever exercised the privilege., explaining that while Cassius Dio reports Livia was voted a lictor, Tacitus says Tiberius flatly refused to allow her use of one.
The division of the Roman provinces into imperial and senatorial provinces, with Augustus holding proconsular imperium over the imperial provinces and administering them through legates, also further expanded the number of fasces. Augustus appointed legates with as governors, each of which was granted five lictors. When Italy was divided into fourteen regions in 7 BC, the of each region was granted two lictors while in office and on station. After the creation of the (military treasury) in AD 6, the three ex-praetors administering it were each granted two lictors as well. Municipal magistrates' lictors also gained fasces during the imperial period.