An emblem from Giles Corrozet's 1540 Hecatomgraphie makes the connection between peace, amity, kinship and the need for unity in early modern Europe quite explicit. The rhyme explaining this emblem asks how much stronger must these qualities be in relations than they are between strangers?: "Si amytié se treuve es estrangers,/ De combien plus entre amys & parens/ Doibt elle avoir ses effectz apparens?/ Non pas fainctifz, desloyaulx ne legiers?"
What follows is a retelling of the story of the death of Scylurus, the Scythain king, that is originally found in Plutarch's Moralia XXIX. On his deathbed he asked his eighty sons (!) to break bundles of arrows that were tied together; when they were unable to, the king drew the arrows out one by one and broke them easily, demonstrating that the only way of preserving their strength was by being joined together in concord.
This is the same idea found in the ancient symbol of the fasces lictoriae, the bundle of elm rods bound up with an axe which was symbol of the Roman Republic, although without the axe which suggested that the state reserved the right to punish wrongdoers to maintain this unity. The image has been used by many subsequently, most obviously in the imagery of Italian fascism which drew its very name from the fasces, but also quite often in American political imagery such as on the obverse of my favourite coin and good luck token the Mercury Dime as well as in the flags or arms of several American states.
It also appears in other contexts. A similar story appears in a legend of Ghengis Khan's ancestor Alan Ho'a, which can be read in the thirteenth-century Secret History of the Mongols. Similarly, it is a lesson taught by the sixteenth-century Japanese warlord Mori Motonari to his sons, an episode familiar, apparently, to all Japanese schoolchildren.
An episode in Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film Ran inverts this story; one son calls the lesson stupid and does, in fact, break the bound arrows over his knee. In the Americas it is recorded as being part of the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederation, in which Hiawatha asked each tribal chief to contribute an arrow to a bundle to symbolise the unity of the general council of tribes. A bundle of bound arrows were to be left beside the sacred fire as a symbol of the unity of the tribes in one confederation. A recent (2010) $1 coin commemorates this, wrapping the five arrows of the five Iroquois tribes in Hiawatha's belt.
Other examples that I don't really have time to follow upon that use sticks not arrows: the story of Svatopluk, king of Moravia who lived between 830 and 894, and the twigs he presented to his sons before his death; the Bulgar account of Khan Kubrat doing the same thing upon his death bed, which has led to the Bulgarian coat of arms containing a bundle of sticks; lastly, possibly a Persian version from the Seljuk period (mid-eleventh century) although I can't find a specific reference to this.
A dreadful pun has just dawned upon me, which I'll use as the title of this post, that the symbol of the fasces is all about sticking together.
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