Musk has a long history of referencing the Roman Empire. His brand of technocratic despotism and its social media iconography has roots in the work of 20th-century European fascists, who were themselves fixated on Ancient Rome. He has long been obsessed with the late Roman Republic dictator Sulla and in December even changed his X avatar to “Kekius Maximus” — a Romanized version of Pepe the Frog dressed in military garb similar to that of Maximus in the film Gladiator (2000). Like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the billionaire has frequently expressed admiration for the Roman Empire, posting AI pictures of himself cosplaying as a Roman soldier and cooking up theories about why ancient Rome fell (answer: severe decline in birth rate). He thinks about it every day.
But from the myth of SPQR to the “Roman salute,” the Roman Empire cited by those fascists — including Hitler — was, in fact, a modern fantasy born in part from art and cinema.
Where did the fiction of the “Roman salute” come from, exactly? As military historian Sara Elise Phang noted in her book, Roman Military Service (2008), there is only one vague reference to a Roman military salute in ancient literature. It was penned by the Jewish historian Josephus in his account of the First Jewish War (66–70 CE), a time when Jews in Judaea rebelled against the Roman Empire. If the myth of this salute didn’t come from ancient art or literature, where else should we look?
In comments to Hyperallergic, ancient military and film historian Gregory S. Aldrete explained that, although Ancient Romans did perform “various gestures involving raising the arm,” especially oratorical gestures when speaking, the so-called “Roman salute” was fabricated much later by visual artists and filmmakers.
“Jacques-Louis David’s painting ‘The Oath of the Horatii’ [1784–5] seems to have started the idea of it being a Roman thing, but it really took off as a gesture in the 19th century,” he said. In the 19th century, other paintings such as French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Ave Caesar! Morituri te Salutant (Hail Caesar! We Who Are about to Die Salute You)” (1859) riffed on notions of loyalty and respect accentuated by David just prior to the French Revolution — this time depicting gladiators.
Classicist Martin M. Winkler took on the modern creation of the salute in his 2009 book The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology, concluding that it began with David’s “The Oath of the Horatii” depicting an early story as described by the Roman historian Livy. Winkler casts this painting as the “starting point for an arresting gesture that progressed from oath-taking to what will become known as the Roman salute” — the precursor to the invention of the “Bellamy salute” in 1892.