Yeah, I follow your positional statement of it quite possibly being about social unity. That’s basically been my primary guess as to where they came from, and it’s an interesting one as it makes The Adversary’s cries of “fascist” true, in a sense, but does anyone mean it or understand it in that way? Almost certainly not (they likely mean “I want power” and “I will gladly slander you for it” and “I am trying to look oppressed as the oppressor”) and we mostly would understand it by the history book definitions. Would they think that understanding of “unity” to be a good thing? Definitely not, as they seek temporary coalition from permanent division, and not unity per se, and definitely not unity around Christian morality. Should we appreciate their accusations of it? No, as it’s attempting to slander us with their deliberately false definition, that better describes their intentions.

Yet as you note, Rome is a curious beast…

• Were the founders looking to usurp us from the beginning and reconstitute Rome’s civic law here?
• Were they appropriating the idea of unity into a known symbol?
• Did they perhaps use a few here and there, and there was a massive uptick in usage in the 1870’s-1940’s to indicate the impregnation of state authority into the apparatuses?
• Other?

It seems like this could absolutely have 2, or maybe even 3 answers from just among those presented, and there may still be other cases that were missed.

I'm a symbolism skeptic. By which I mean

Like words, they can absolutely have multiple meanings ascribed and translated from them, sometimes even meanings that completely conflict - https://greatawakening.win/p/19BZkuH0BK/troublesome-words/c/ Huge reason it’s basically impossible to sit down and say, “oh, it just means this.”