If this was 1938 and we were in school – and assuming we were both still allowed in school – this would be a fine question. The best comparison, though, wouldn't be really Caesar; but rather Augustus.

Caesar had came to prominence through war – well, sort of, but let's say that's what a teacher would tell you, if they were so inclined – and, even if he had started a process, he had failed to pacify and to stabilize the institutions of Rome. Augustus, instead, was a true leader with a political vision encompassing the centuries. A man capable of bringing forth a new, modern idea of Rome; while at the same time safeguarding and restoring the ideas, morals, and ethos that had given birth to the soon-to-be immortal City. A man who had created a formidable military power in order to maintain peace and secure the well being of his people – just like Mussolini had done in Munich, of course.

Naturally – if you asked the question in 1942 – all that peace bullshit would have been out of place. Mussolini would have been Alexander the Great or something like that, and Alexander himself a “fascist” ante litteram.

Someone else might have objected to the comparison with Augustus. After all – assuming they were more “clerically” oriented – Mussolini's greatest achievement wouldn't really have been of merely temporal nature. In 1929, soon after the Concordat, Constantine would have been a more apt comparison. Or even – if we really wish to push it – St. Francis. Which, I admit, sounds a bit outlandish; but, with his reckless youth, the war, the conversion, founding his own order, preaching, gaining acceptance from the authorities in spite of the hostility of the old establishment... It was a popular comparison during the celebrations for the 700 years of the Saint's canonization.

Now, I know that this is not exactly what you were asking. Yet, I believe it's quite important to keep in mind that these ideas, these comparisons, aren't born in a vacuum. They originate from the Regime's self-representation and they reflect the image that the Regime wished to project, as well as interpreting (or merely reproducing) the legacy it strove to establish.

The association between Italian Fascism and Rome is almost taken as a natural, obvious fact. The idea that Fascism wanted to restore Italy to the glories and fates of the old Roman Empire is indeed true, in so far as we understand that that's how Fascism presented itself (above all) to the outside world. But Fascism wasn't born because someone wished to restore Rome of old, nor to fashion Rome anew. Indeed – save from the references to a Roman past made by D'Annunzio already during the war (but not really by Mussolini or other Fascist leaders) – the early days of Fascism are full of anything but a particular interest for the Roman past, a world of dusty tomes and crusty academia. Our ease in relying on the comparison reaches the point that people often assume that the word Fascio comes from the Latin “fasces”; which is absolutely what your school teacher would tell you in 1938, and probably in 1929 as well. Because they had been told so themselves.

But in 1919 – or 1924 to be honest – very, very few teachers would have heard of those lictores carrying the fasces, symbols of power of command and justice. Fascio, as a word, meant “a bundle of rods or sticks fastened in such a way that one could carry them”. It was a common term used for political formations or associations, symbol of strength out of the unity of equals. It had an original republican connotation – directly tied to revolutionary France – and had been adopted by various political formations throughout, mostly of the radical left. By 1919, though, it was extremely widespread, to the point of being used by the national-interventionist Fascio Parlamentare di Difesa Nazionale. And, if one can be excused in assumeìing that the Fasci di Combattimento understood the “Romanity” of their symbol, I struggle to see how this would apply to the choice of the future leaders of the Communist Party of Italy with the Fascio Giovanile Socialista, or to the various Fasci Anarchici, or Fasci Wilsoniani, or Fasci Leninisti.

Of course, this kind of haphazard natural selection – by 1922 there weren't that many Fasci Socialisti left – didn't exactly make for an educational or inspirational story. And thus the Regime went in search for a few quarters of nobility in the ancient ruins laying, often still uncovered, under the soil of the homeland of craven and inept parliamentarism. With the mid-to-late 1920s the Fascist Regime took a keener – and often reciprocated – interest into the efforts of Roman Academia (of the whole world of classicism to be fair), promoting, among other things, a rediscovery of the Roman origins of the – by then widely accepted – symbol of Italian Fascism, that had been often misrepresented by its improper association with Jacobinism and was, instead, a true Roman heritage. This “search” included funding for actual archaeological evidence of the fasces as well as for the related publications, that certainly earned more attention than routine archaeological findings would have commanded.

This is only one example of how the Regime actively sought to shape and adapt – not only to adopt – the conceits and ideas we associate with “Romanity”. I'll leave the whole history of the restructuring of the public space around “monuments” of the Roman past (and of how, I dare assume, many archaeologists of today would not be too fond of the idea of “monumentality” as a criterium for historical relevance).

There is anyways no doubt that “Romanity” - from classical literature, to archaeology, law, art, politics – represented a powerful pole of attraction, a “brand” so to speak, for the Western elites. In this sense, the Fascist Regime, commonplace jokes aside, was quite successful in promoting an image of itself.

As I tried to show with my examples, the question “was Caesar a fascist” is not so far removed from: “was Caesar as awesome as Mussolini, or is Mussolini who is as awesome as Caesar?” By which, I mean, that chronologically Caesar came before Mussolini, but semantically – and as a meaning-maker – Mussolini came before Caesar.

We should – I feel – approach this kind of questions with special care.

There is another point I feel should discourage this sort of approaches. Fascism is – essentially – a phenomenon that is both “modern” and “historical”. In the sense that it dealt chiefly with issues of modernity and in a specific historical context.

Whenever I see the question whether this or that historical figure was “a fascist”, I can't help but wonder: can there be “a fascist”, a fascist without “fascism”? Isn't that a bit like asking whether Pericles would be a Republican or a Democrat, Lutheran or Calvinist?

Or, rather, was Caesar's Rome “fascist”? What were his attitudes concerning “Bolshevism”? How did he manage to address the heavy consequences of the Great War? What policies did he promote concerning women employment, strikes and labor organizations? What did he think of liberalism, the parliamentary system, universal suffrage? Freedom of the press? Radio? Cinema? Aviation?

It's not that we can't find any similarity. We probably can find many. But those elements I briefly skimmed through were important – and some perhaps decisive – in determining what Fascism was and how it came to be. In the same way as other, similar perhaps but certainly distinct, elements were in shaping the last years of the Roman Republic.

Conceit such as “populist” and “authoritarian” are taken – in general – to be much broader in scope because they mirror quite accurately how certain historical figures viewed their contemporaries. I would – from my very modest knowledge of the subject – feel no shame in claiming that Cicero believed Catilina to be a “populist” of some sort, with all the inciting riots and such. Accurate or not, the conceit would make sense in that context.

Other conceits – I feel – make little sense and are of little use out of context, and might conceal more than they reveal.