Seems As If They Had A Point

[Rev. Rye]

Well, the Romans did it first.



That said, while it's widely talked about in Roman literature (Quintillian goes into remarkable detail about the length of the) and somewhat depicted in Roman art, as seen in this statue of Augustus, it seems that in Roman days, it seemed a bit more relaxed than Jacques-Louis David would eventually codify the gesture into:



This gesture became a running motif in David's works, whether it was in his paintings of Roman History or the French Revolution, or Napoleon. Ralph Bellamy would eventually be inspired to write it into the Pledge of Allegiance salute. Meanwhile, in Europe, Gabrielle D'Annunzio would put the salute into his screenplay for Cabiria, and five years after Cabiria, he would eventually use it as part of the ritual for the first Fascist state when he occupied the city of Fiume. Eventually, it would be adopted when D'Annunzio became close to Benito Mussolini and eventually, similar movements across the world adopted it, and, after 1945, for reasons which should be obvious, it became a lot less common, whether in real life or in movies that actually were about ancient Rome.