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.