The Codex Fori Mussolini: A Latin Text of Italian Fascism

Description

The year is 1932. In Rome, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini unveils a giant obelisk of white marble, bearing the Latin inscription MVSSOLINI DVX. Invisible to the cheering crowds, a metal box lies immured in the obelisk's base. It contains a few gold coins and, written on a piece of parchment, a Latin text: the Codex fori Mussolini. What does this text say? Why was it buried there? And why was it written in Latin? The Codex, composed by the classical scholar Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci (1867-1960), presents a carefully constructed account of the rise of Italian Fascism and its leader, Benito Mussolini. Though written in the language of Roman antiquity, the Codex was supposed to reach audiences in the distant future. Placed under the obelisk with future excavation and rediscovery in mind, the Latin text was an attempt at directing the future reception of Italian Fascism. This book renders the Codex accessible to scholars and students of different disciplines, offering a thorough and wide-ranging introduction, a clear translation, and a commentary elucidating the text's rhetorical strategies, historical background, and specifics of phrasing and reference. As the first detailed study of a Fascist Latin text, it also throws new light on the important role of the Latin language in Italian Fascist culture.

Han Lamers is Research Fellow at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Leuven, Belgium. His research focuses on the Classical Tradition in Early Modern and Modern Europe. He is the author of Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (2015). Bettina Reitz-Joosse is Assistant Professor of Latin Literature at Groningen University. Her research focuses on the relation between Latin literature and Roman material culture and on Classical Reception in Italian Fascism.

Offers a new element in the mosaic of Latin texts under Fascism and gives back to scholars and cultivated people a forgotten work ... The authors offer a detailed edition, translation and commentary of the text and show a not so common knowledge of the complex dynamics of the Italian culture of these years, as the rich bibliography shows. They correctly place in context the composition of this political summary of the most important features of Fascism. Moreover, they explain with the help of a rich and useful set of illustrations the geographical position of the text and of the monuments that host it, while posing interesting questions on the role of this text in reception studies concerning Roman Fascism, placing themselves in the most productive tradition of Realien. * Classical Journal * [The authors] are to be congratulated for bringing this interesting document to a wider public. The book has been proofread meticulously ... and is lavishly illustrated. * Classics for All Reviews * Stands out as an excellent introduction, not only to Fascist neo-Latin, but to Fascist romanita more generally. * Thersites * Lamers's and Reitz-Joosse's philological expertise is evident in their critical analysis of the text ... and they do an admirable job of situating the Codex in relation to its ancient antecedents, its political setting, and its function within the larger tableau of the Foro Italico ... The authors should be commended for bringing this (literally) buried treasure to light, and for the rigor with which they pry it open. This book will be of significant interest to scholars of Fascism and classical reception studies, and could potentially be a valuable pedagogical tool in the classroom, as a concise document of the regime's self-image and its message to the future. * International Journal of the Classical Tradition * The fascinating product of Lamers's and Reitz-Joosse's laudable efforts to shed much-needed light on the history of this parchment ... I took so much pleasure in re-reading the text with the help of the commentary that I ended up wishing for more. * Fascism * [The book] will prove valuable for any serious scholar of Fascist romanita. Lamers and Reitz-Joosse have done a great deal of archival work not only on Amatucci's codex, but on many other Latin compositions from the Fascist period, and their bibliography is replete with sources. The book's brevity, along with its clear prose, makes it an appealing text for students as a gateway to understanding Fascist culture from primary source material. Their thorough commentary will allow even those with no Latin background to appreciate the subtle rhetorical strategies of Amatucci's Latin. It will also be of interest to students of Latin prose composition. * The Classical Review * This fascinating, excellently researched and richly illustrated volume presents the first modern edition and English translation (with commentary) of a neo-Latin text of 1932, a brief propagandistic history of Italian fascism, which played a central role in Mussolini's self-imaging as a new Augustus and in the configuration of his ambitious architectural complex of the Foro Mussolini at Rome. This revealing account of a forgotten document will be of lively interest to students and scholars of both Italian fascism and classical reception. * Stephen Harrison, Fellow and Tutor in Classics, University of Oxford, UK * This exhaustive and well-written treatment of the Fascist document Codex Fori Mussolini will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with the document itself and with the place it occupies in Mussolini's grandiose attempts to present himself as a successor to the Caesars. * Richard F. Thomas, George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics, Harvard University, USA * This elegant case study sheds a brilliant new light on the forms and uses of classicism in Fascist Italy. Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse show how Mussolini and his followers adopted--and adapted--ancient forms in language, architecture and city planning to legitimate a very modern regime. * Anthony T. Grafton, Professor of History, Princeton University, USA *