Bettina Reitz-Joosse and Han Lamers are the first to translate and study in detail the Codex Fori Mussolini, which, despite being buried at the base of the 300-tonne monument to the power of fascism when it was erected in 1932, has largely been forgotten in the intervening decades. [...]
"The text wasn't meant for contemporaries at the time," Dr Reitz-Joosse, who works at the University of Groningen, told the BBC. "The obelisk was a major spectacle but the existence of the text wasn't reported at all. It was meant for an audience in the remote future. [...]
Dr Reitz-Joosse suggests the author chose to use a language of the past to draw a link between the Roman empire and the rise of fascism.
In addition, she says the fascists were also trying to re-establish Latin as the international language of fascism: "part of an attempt to establish a Fascist International akin to the Communist International" organisation, which advocated world communism. [...]
The irony of this text is that its discovery is predicated on the fall of the obelisk, and therefore the fall of fascism. The fascists were imagining their own decline and fall, says Dr Reitz-Joosse.
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