When the world’s richest man takes center stage, people take notice. When the world’s richest man takes center stage and performs a Nazi salute, that’s when the fascists come crawling out of the woodwork.
On Inauguration Day in the United States, tech oligarch and general societal menace Elon Musk took to the presidential parade stage to congratulate Donald Trump and to thank the crowd for their support. “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk pronounced, extending his arm out straight. He turned and repeated the gesture — making sure everyone could see.
Then, the internet exploded. Was it a Nazi salute? Was it a “Bellamy salute,” a gesture popularized at the end of the 19th century to perform during the newly drafted Pledge of Allegiance? Right-wing media outlets champed at the bit to defend Musk. Even the Anti-Defamation League rushed to defend the gesture as simply “awkward.” European media immediately denounced him and major scholars of fascism like Ruth Ben-Ghiat decried the gesture as a Nazi salute; others wrote off the gesture as an expression of Musk’s autism.
But a new theory came to the fore when Musk’s close Italian ally and defender, Andrea Stroppa, posted a now-deleted statement on X: “Roman Empire is back starting from Roman salute.” Alongside Stroppa’s avatar and alternate name, Claudius Nero’s Legion, was a wolf emoji. This is likely a nod to the “Lupa Capitolina,” a female wolf who symbolized Rome alongside its folkloric founders, Romulus and Remus. The bad romance between Musk and Ancient Rome had reemerged.
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.
Though invented by his aide James Upham, the Bellamy salute is named for the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, a Baptist minister named Francis Bellamy who pushed to get flags and the pledge into classrooms across the United States in the late 19th century. Princeton historian Kevin Kruse told Hyperallergic that the gesture was meant to accompany the pledge, written for the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.
“It called for a military-style salute which was then extended as a palm-out gesture ‘to the flag’ as those words were recited,” said Kruse, who further discusses the pledge in his 2016 book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. “When Italian and German fascists adopted a similar salute decades later, the Bellamy salute came under fire. In 1942, Congress officially changed the salute to a hand held over the heart.” (Musk, on the other hand, has not distanced himself from Nazi sympathizing and regularly jokes about it.)
In the 1900s, the “Roman salute” further crept into popular visual culture through early films focused on the passion of Christ or Christianity in a Roman context and through art. Movies like Ben Hur (1925) and the Italian version of Quo Vadis (1913) had a huge visual impact, according to Winkler. Roman oratorical hand gestures with a right hand held up for speaking had been known already through statues like the Augustus of Prima Porta and the equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius.
Winkler argues that Mussolini and the Fascist Party of Italy later drew on films and misinterpretations of art in the development of their signature salute around 1925. In Germany, the word heil (“hail”) was already used as a form of greeting in the early 20th century. A version of the Nazi salute later adapted by Hitler was used by Georg Ritter von Schönerer, the leader of the extremist German nationalist party in Austria, as historian Wolfgang Schieder has written. Hitler, however, admitted in 1942 that he followed Mussolini’s lead, adding the salute to the greeting.
Since the beginning of Trump’s first presidency, neo-Nazis have used the idea of the “Roman salute” to cloak their violent beliefs in apocryphal ancient history and make themselves more palatable to a popular audience. In a 2018 article, classics professor Curtis Dozier discussed the use of the salute by white supremacists and neo-Nazi groups by pointing to a journalist speaking to Jeff Schoep, former head of the National Socialist Movement (NSM). During a video of the exchange filmed by the journalist, Schoep disputed the term “Nazi salute” and claimed the gesture used during the rally was instead a “Roman salute.” Dozier pointed out that Schoep’s insistence that the gesture was distinct from the Nazi salute was “part of NSM’s effort, announced in November 2016, to ‘re-brand’ their movement and ‘launch [the] party into the mainstream.’”
For his part, Musk has not provided a clarification or outright denial that he gave a Nazi salute.
“Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired,” he wrote on X later on Inauguration Day. And yet, his history of antisemitic posts and his recent conversation with Germany’s far-right candidate Alice Weidel already gesture to Nazi sympathies.
Roman military history has long attracted a certain White male demographic, but when politics, power, and artistic propaganda get involved, things can take a fascist turn. Hitler famously manipulated the Greek sculptural “Discobolus” figure for his own ends, just as Mussolini tapped into his passion for Roman military history through his use of SPQR and construction of Romanesque monuments in his name and likeness.
As Musk and his DOGE taskforce carve out their own distorted, neo-Roman Empire, like the one of fascists past, we must be careful to dispel and question his revisions of history. Although the “Roman salute” was a later fabrication of ancient history perpetuated by art, film, and fascists, the use of the Roman Empire as a metonymic warrant for unbridled imperialism is alarming. What matters is that students of history learn to recognize the trappings of this ahistorical propaganda — and refuse to salute it.
