Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Cincinnatus is the Roman example of a man who took absolute power and gave it back. Born around 519 BC into a patrician family, he is a figure of tradition rather than of documented history; the account comes from Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing four centuries later. He was consul in 460 BC. His son Caeso had been prosecuted for violence against the plebeians and had fled, and Cincinnatus paid the enormous fine, which is why the tradition has him reduced to a small farm across the Tiber. In 458 BC a Roman army under one of the consuls was surrounded by the Aequi in a mountain pass at Mount Algidus. The Senate appointed Cincinnatus dictator, an office with unlimited authority for six months. The envoys are said to have found him ploughing, or digging a ditch, and to have asked him to put on his toga to hear the Senate's message. He took the office, raised every man of military age, marched that night, and surrounded the besiegers, who surrendered. He made the Aequi pass under a yoke of spears, held a triumph, and resigned the dictatorship after sixteen days, returning to the farm. The tradition has him summoned again at about eighty in 439 BC to deal with an alleged plot to make Spurius Maelius king, and again resigning promptly. The story was central to the Roman self-image and to the American revolutionary one. Washington's resignation of his commission was explicitly compared to it, and the Society of the Cincinnati and the city of Cincinnati are named for him.
- Lived: 519 BCE – 430 BCE
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: statesman, military_leader, dictator
