coinage) where space was limited and thus often had familiar abbreviations. The most prevalent use of the acronym for the phrase is not in texts - which allowed for expansive writing - but upon numismatic evidence (i.e. Cicero saw it as an essential compromise of power within the constitution of the republic: two groups that checked each other’s authority. Most of our literary references to “Senatus Populusque Romanus” come from the late Republican era statesman and rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE), though Caesar, Livy, Augustus, Pliny, and many other late Latin authors used it as well. A historical examination accentuates the fact that SPQR underwent several visual manipulations throughout antiquity, the late middle ages, and then under the fascist regime of Mussolini, both in literature and visual art. The Pharos site is run by Vassar College classicist Curtis Dozier, who spoke to Hyperallergic about Pharos’s extensive documentation of the use of SPQR: “The examples we documented connected the symbol to European racial and cultural purity, idealization of military power and violence, and admiration of Hitler and Nazi ideology.” But in order to understand the roots of this troubling appropriation of ancient language and iconography - and to distinguish its various uses by groups, some of whom simply wish to admire ancient Rome - we must first look back at the long history of the acronym.
The question was whether a local activist group was justified in labeling the flag as a Nazi symbol. The issue was brought to the site’s attention when debate arose about a SPQR flag flown outside a student rental house in Athens, Ohio late last year. While today the abbreviation is used rather innocuously in most instances, recent reports have shown that a growing number of white supremacist groups have begun to adopt the ancient acronym to symbolize their movement - and use it in a militaristic mode starkly different from the ways in which the Romans actually applied it.Ī July 2018 post on Pharos, a website committed to exposing the modern appropriation of classical texts and imagery by hate groups, addressed the manipulation of SPQR by white nationalist groups in the United States and consulted classical scholars about the history of the phrase. In antiquity, it was a shorthand means of signifying the entirety of the Roman state by referencing its two component parts: Rome’s Senate and her people.
Upon the triumphal arches, the altars, and the coins of Rome, SPQR stood for Senatus Populusque Romanus (the Senate and the Roman people). The shield is now on display in the museum in Arles ( image by Carole Raddato via Flickr and used by permission). The central inscription notes its award by the “Senatus / Populusque Romanus” (Senate and Roman People) as a means of legitimizing the unprecedented honor using the language of the Republic.
This is an ancient marble copy of a shield called the clipeus virtutis awarded to Augustus in 27 BCE and hung in the Senate House in Rome.