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Fasces

By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.

Description

Rods and axe of imperium

Livy and other Roman historians treat the fasces as Etruscan-derived badges of magistrates, carried by lictors: rods for beating, an axe for capital power (the axe often omitted inside the pomerium). This is civic ritual, not a god-forged weapon. Stories that push the bundle back to Romulus are later Roman origin-talk. The object is historical. It belongs with Roman state signs rather than with Homeric arms. Unity of the bundle is a modern slogan laid on an ancient police-and-jurisdiction tool.

Primary Sources

“The lictors carried the fasces before the magistrates, rods bound about an axe, the sign of the power to scourge and to behead.”
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (magisterial fasces)(c. late 1st century BCE)

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