Fascis lictorius is a poem in eighteen Alcaic stanzas that Taberini wrote in 1923. It praises Fascism, which is presented as the revival of the ‘Roman’ ideals of youth and strength,  symbolised by the fasces. After evoking the crisis that hit Italy right after the First World War (stanzas 3-4), the poet hails the emergence of Fascism as the providential recovery of the nation’s prosperity (stanzas 5-12). In the last section of the poem (stanzas 13-18), Taberini turns to the Roman myth according to which the cults of Juventus and Terminus had been absorbed into Jupiter’s cult with the establishment of his temple on the Capitoline hill in the late sixth century BCE (see Livy, History of Rome 1, 55; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 3, 69, 3-6). As Terminus was the god of boundaries and Juventus the goddess of youth and rejuvenation, Taberini can use this myth to represent Fascism as the revival of Rome’s eternal power. The poem was first published in Taberini (1923) and republished with commentary and analysis in Scriba (2003).

Bibliography

Latin texts

Taberini, Luigi. 1923. Fascis lictorius. Alcaei naufragium. Carmi alcaici con traduzione italiana e note. Arcona: Tipografia Dorica.

Secondary sources

Fedeli, Paolo. 2020. ‘Uso e abuso della poesia di Orazio nelle odi al duce e al fascismo’. In Studies in the Latin Literature and Epigraphy in Italian Fascism, edited by Han Lamers, Bettina Reitz-Joosse, and Valerio Sanzotta, 51–76. Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia 46. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Garavani, Giunio. 1935. ‘Commemorazione del prof. Luigi Taberini’. In Atti Del III Congresso Nazionale Di Studi Romani, edited by Carlo Galassi Paluzzi. Vol. 4. Bologna: Licinio Cappelli - Editore.

Scriba, Friedemann. 2003. ‘Mussolini-Panegyrik im alkäischen Vers’. Altsprachlicher Unterricht 46 (1): 38–42.

Nicolò Bettegazzi