Italian fascist exhibitions and Ezra Pound's move to the imperial

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2005 by Catherine E. Paul

Similarly, although Pound's earlier writings about imperial Rome emphasize its decadence, those of the late 1930s follow a wider fascist valorization of that ancient empire. (18) His earlier comments present Rome as a pale imitation of Greek greatness: an article of 1922 comments that "Athens had a civilization, Rome had an empire, and the greatest virtue of that empire was to act as a carrier for Athenian civilization" (Visual Arts 171). On the other hand, an article published in May 1937 in the Globe (St. Paul, Minnesota) sees Rome more favorably. Pound addresses discussion of a United States of Europe and suggests that there are more important trends in the European situation. He says, "there is an older dream based on perceptions and instincts far more vigorous than rough analogy with the U.S. Constitution and the Articles of Confederation." That dream is Italy's renewed Roman Empire, but it is not "merely Italian":

     The watchful reader should not fall into the error of supposing
     this dream [of a renewed empire] to be purely, or merely, Italian.
     The Roman Empire civilized the occident as we know it. The IDEAL
     was so solid that it persisted in Constantinople for centuries. It
     persisted in German Europe, in the very terminology of the Rulers.
     It was an ideal of ORDER, not of bunk, not of humanitarian
     illogicality but of a POSSIBLE ORDER functioning amid very perfect
     human beings without any calculation being made on their sudden
     and/or total amelioration before next Saturday fortnight.
        Obviously no man will be able to THINK the revival of the Roman
     Empire clearly unless he have some fairly clear and articulate idea
     of what the old Roman Empire was and how it came into being. (P & P
     7: 191)

Gone is Pound's concern about Rome's decadence or its tendency to produce empty copies of copies of artworks (Gaudier-Brzeska 106, 110). Like the writers of the catalogue for the Mostra Augustea, he asserts the continuity of the Roman ideal through centuries in which it seemed to slumber. His description of this continuity comes in the context of the dream of a new Rome, much as the Mostra Augustea justifies Mussolini's new empire. He explains Rome's successes--and the reasons for a Roman sense of order--in the economic terms that had become his structure for understanding the history of ideas, civilizations, and art:

     Dr. Walton [Brooks] McDaniel [professor of Latin at the University
     of Pennsylvania] writes to me, "Few people realize what a disease
     usury was in the (Roman) Republican period." My own hypothesis is
     that the Roman Empire became possible when the Greek (maritime)
     usury system gave way to the more moderate agrarian usury of the
     Romans. (P & P 7: 191-92). (19)

In other words, Rome's true glories came with the empire--beginning with the reign of Augustus and continuing through Constantine and Justinian--and they were facilitated by economic shifts. Lest a reader of the Globe miss Pound's correlation between the future of Europe and the greatness of ancient Rome, the article is printed with a large Roman-style triumphal arch above the text and the article's title--"EVROPE--MCMXXXVI"--chiseled across its attic face. The iconography of Mussolini's imperial aspirations frames Pound's ideas.