Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany

Download or read book Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany written by Helen Roche and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.