Cincinnatus Called from the Plough: Roman Virtue Incarnate
A Roman senator was called from his plough in 458 BC, made dictator, saved an army, and went home sixteen days later. The story as Livy tells it is that the consul Minucius had let his army be surrounded by the Aequi in a valley near Mount Algidus, that the senate appointed Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus dictator with absolute power for six months, and that the delegation found him working a four-acre farm across the Tiber. He asked his wife for his toga so as to receive the senate's message decently dressed. He raised the city's remaining men, marched by night, surrounded the besiegers in turn, and made them pass under the yoke. He then celebrated a triumph, resigned the dictatorship after fifteen or sixteen days, and returned to the farm. Whether any of it happened as described is doubtful. Livy wrote four centuries later from annalistic sources that were themselves reconstructions, and the account is shaped throughout as a moral example for readers who had just watched dictators behave differently. That is what makes it consequential rather than what makes it true. The story is the Roman Republic's own account of what a magistrate should be — power taken because it is needed, used, and given back — and it was invoked constantly under the empire, in the Renaissance, and by the American revolutionaries. Washington's resignation of his commission in 1783 was explicitly compared to it, and the officers' society he headed was named the Cincinnati. He is said to have been called back a second time at eighty, in 439 BC, to deal with an alleged plot, and to have gone home again. Two American towns and a good deal of republican iconography are named for a man about whom almost nothing can be verified.
- Year: 458 BCE
- Category: Political
