Cincinnatus: The Man Who Ruled Rome for Sixteen Days

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the sixteen days of 458 BC, and how early Rome was actually governed — from the seven kings who built the city to the office designed to be handed back, and the man George Washington was measured against.

1. How the kingdom worked

Rome began as a monarchy and stayed one for two and a half centuries. The king — rex — held the whole of public power. He commanded the army in war, served as the city’s chief priest before the gods, and judged its gravest cases. This was real and undivided authority, the full weight of the state in one pair of hands.

But in the tradition it was not a simple hereditary throne. A king did not hand the crown to his son as a matter of course. When a king died, authority returned to the Senate, which appointed an interrex — a “between-king” — to hold the office in short turns until a successor was chosen, presented to the people’s assembly, and confirmed. The Senate — from senex, an old man, a council of elders — advised the king throughout his reign. Its members were the patres, the “fathers,” the heads of Rome’s leading houses.

So even under the kings, the power was granted and the power was advised. A good king ran Rome with the counsel of its leading men and the assent of its people, and the system worked. For most of its run, it worked well.

2. The seven kings — and most were good

Tradition counts seven kings between the founding in 753 BC and the fall of the monarchy in 509. Each is remembered for what he built.

Romulus (753–715 BC; reigned 38 years), the founder. He laid out the city on the Palatine, created the Senate as a council of one hundred patres, divided the people into three tribes and thirty curiae, and raised the first army. The tradition of the Sabine women and his joint rule with the Sabine king Titus Tatius records Rome as a union of peoples from the very start.

Numa Pompilius (715–673 BC; reigned 42 years), a Sabine chosen for his wisdom and piety. He gave Rome its religion and its calendar: the priestly colleges, the Vestal Virgins who kept the city’s sacred fire, the pontiffs, and the festivals that ordered the year. He is remembered for a long reign of peace — government by law and rite rather than by the sword.

Tullus Hostilius (673–642 BC; reigned 31 years), the warrior-king. He made war on Rome’s own mother-city, Alba Longa, and destroyed it — the tradition preserves the duel of the three Roman Horatii against the three Alban Curiatii, fought to settle the war between the cities — and he built the Senate its first house, the Curia Hostilia.

Ancus Marcius (642–617 BC; reigned 25 years), a grandson of Numa, and a builder. He threw the first bridge across the Tiber, the wooden Pons Sublicius; founded Rome’s port at the river mouth, Ostia; and brought conquered Latins into the city as plebeians.

Tarquinius Priscus (616–579 BC; reigned 37 years), the first of the Etruscan kings, from the city of Tarquinii. He drained the marshy ground between the hills with the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer still partly in service today; laid out the Circus Maximus; and began the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. He enlarged the Senate, raising new families into the patres.

Servius Tullius (578–535 BC; reigned 43 years), the great reformer, and to many Rome’s second founder. He took the first census, sorting the citizens by wealth into classes and centuries — tying a man’s military duty and his weight in the assembly to his property — and gave Rome the centuriate assembly and the wall that long bore his name. He turned a city into a state with a structure.

Six kings built Rome from a hilltop settlement into a real city: a Senate, a religion, a calendar, public works, a census, a wall. The seventh broke the pattern — and that break is the most interesting thing in the whole story, so it gets its own section.

3. Why Rome let the kings go

The seventh king was Tarquinius Superbus — Tarquin the Proud (535–509 BC; the last reign, about twenty-five years). In the tradition he took the throne by having his predecessor, Servius Tullius, murdered, and then ruled without the Senate and without the grant of the people: the first king to hold the office by force rather than by the consent every king before him had received. He was not incapable. He extended Rome’s power among the Latin cities and finished the great temple on the Capitol. But he ruled as an owner of Rome, not a steward of it.

The break came over his own household. His son Sextus raped Lucretia, a noblewoman of the city; she told her husband and father what had been done and then took her own life. Lucius Junius Brutus led Rome in revolt and drove the Tarquins out. The year was 509 BC. Rome abolished the kingship.

The man who lit the revolt was the king’s own son. Superbus had taken the throne by murder, without the grant of Senate and people that every earlier king had received, and his sons stood to inherit that usurped power by the same right of force. In Sextus’s outrage Rome saw what another Tarquin generation would be, and refused to let the line keep a throne it had seized and abused. That refusal was the right one: a house that takes power by force and holds it by fear has no claim to hand it on.

This is the part worth slowing down for. Rome did not abolish the monarchy because monarchy had failed. Six kings had built the city, and several had built it well. The trouble was the seventh — and the deeper trouble was that once a bad king held power by force, Rome had no way to be rid of him but revolt. A good king is the best government a city can have. A bad king with no off-switch is the worst. The Romans had just lived through the second kind, and they resolved never to risk it again.

What they built in its place was not the opposite of monarchy. It was monarchy with the lock taken off. They kept the king’s power — the imperium, the right of command — and they split it, timed it, and made it answerable:

• They gave it to two men at once, the consuls, each able to veto the other.
• They made it expire: one year in office, then out.
• They made it granted, not seized: the consuls were elected.
• They placed it under appeal: a citizen condemned by a magistrate could appeal to the people (provocatio).

And they kept one piece of the old kingship in reserve. For a true emergency — an army about to be destroyed, the city in mortal danger — they allowed a single man to hold a king’s undivided power again. Rome called him the master of the people, the magister populi, and gave him a single deputy, the master of the horse (magister equitum). But the office was fenced: he was named by the consuls, not self-appointed; he held it for one task; and his term was capped at six months. The engine of one-man command, kept ready in the shed, with the permanence taken out of it. (This is the office a later age would know by a harsher name — but that name had not yet curdled, and section 9 tells how it did.)

The word rex itself became hated in Rome — not because a king was an evil thing, but because the memory of the one who would not go was so expensive. For centuries afterwards, to accuse a Roman of “aiming at kingship” was among the gravest charges that could be laid against him. The whole Republic rested on a single hard lesson, bought once and never forgotten: keep the power, lose the permanence.

4. The families who ran it

If the consuls changed every year and the kings were gone, what held Rome together and gave it direction was the Senate — and behind the Senate, the families. The patres, the fathers, gave their name to the patricians, the old aristocracy of Rome. Kings had come and gone and consuls served a single year, but the Senate of fathers endured, and it was the real seat of the city’s memory and its policy.

Rome was a city of gentes — clans, each with its own name, its own cults, and its own honoured ancestors. The great houses ran through the whole of Roman history: the Cornelii, the Fabii, the Valerii, the Aemilii, the Claudii (a Sabine clan that came to Rome in the early Republic), the Julii (who traced their line to Aeneas and through him to a goddess) — and the Quinctii, the clan into which Cincinnatus was born.

Below the level of law, the city was bound together by the patron-client tie. Each great family stood at the head of a body of clients who owed it loyalty and service and received its protection and support in return. This was the connective tissue of Roman society — the web of obligation that made a clan a power in the state.

Over this sat the offices of the Republic: the two consuls and the lesser magistrates beneath them, the Senate advising and directing, the assemblies of the people granting and electing. And folded into the design, held in reserve, was the emergency command — the mastership of the people, the one office that briefly gathered into a single man the very power the whole rest of the system existed to keep divided. It was meant to be used rarely, and given back fast. In 458 BC it was used exactly as designed.

5. Who Cincinnatus was

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a patrician of the gens Quinctia. The name Cincinnatus is a cognomen meaning “curly-haired,” from cincinnus, a curl or lock of hair — the kind of plain, physical nickname Roman families carried and passed down. He had reached the top of Roman public life: he was suffect consul in 460 BC, appointed mid-year to replace the consul Publius Valerius, who had been killed retaking the Capitol from a band that had seized it.

He was a conservative of the hard old kind, set against the plebeian tribunes who were then pressing to have the consuls’ power written down and limited. And he was no marble saint — the tradition does not pretend otherwise. His son Caeso was a violent young patrician who broke up the tribunes’ assemblies by force. Prosecuted for it, Caeso jumped bail and fled into exile, and the sureties his father had pledged for him were forfeit.

That is why a former consul of Rome was working four iugera — about three acres — across the Tiber with his own hands, instead of running a great estate worked by slaves. When Rome came looking for him, it found a man brought low by his own family’s politics, ploughing the little he had left.

6. The plough and the toga — the sixteen days

In 458 BC the Aequi, a hill people to the east, broke their treaty with Rome and trapped a Roman army — under the consul Lucius Minucius — on Mount Algidus in the Alban Hills. The Aequi ringed the Roman camp; only five horsemen broke through to carry word to the city. The other consul could not reach them in time. The Senate met in the night, voted to name a master of the people, and chose Cincinnatus.

The senators crossed the Tiber at first light to the Quinctian Meadows. They found him at work — leaning on a spade, or guiding the plough, his tunic laid aside. They asked him to put on his toga to hear what they had come to say. He called to his wife, Racilia, to bring it from the cottage, wiped off the sweat and the dust, and stood. Then they told him: Rome had handed him supreme command, and an army was about to die.

What he did with the power was swift and total. He named Lucius Tarquitius his master of the horse and ordered every man of military age to the Campus Martius by dusk, each carrying five days’ rations and twelve sharpened stakes. They marched through the night and reached Algidus in the dark. Cincinnatus threw his men around the outside of the Aequian siege lines and set them to dig a ditch and plant the stakes — a wall around the besiegers. By dawn the Aequi, who had trapped a Roman army, were themselves trapped between that army and Cincinnatus. Minucius’s men broke out; the Aequi, caught on two sides at once, surrendered.

He spared the beaten army but not its humiliation. The Aequi were made to “pass under the yoke” — to stoop one by one beneath a frame of three spears, the old ritual mark of an army that had given in.

He led the army back to a triumph through Rome, the captured Aequian commander walking before his chariot. And then, with the danger past, he did the thing he is remembered for. He resigned. Fifteen or sixteen days after being handed absolute power over Rome — of a possible one hundred and eighty — he laid the office down and went back to the farm.

7. His method of governance

You can state Cincinnatus’s method of government in four lines. He took supreme power only when Rome lawfully summoned him to it; he did not seek it. He used it completely and fast, spending the whole force of the office on the single task it had been granted for. He laid it down the moment that task was finished, well inside the legal term. And he went back to being a private man on his own land, holding no office, no army, and no standing power.

That is the good king for a fortnight: all the decisiveness of one-man command, with none of the lock-in. Rome got a king when it needed one, and was rid of him on time — because he handed himself back.

The tradition gives him a second turn at it. In 439 BC, in a time of famine, a wealthy man named Spurius Maelius was buying grain and giving it out to the people, and was suspected of using the gift to make himself king. Cincinnatus, by now an old man, was called back to the same emergency command. He named Gaius Servilius Ahala his master of the horse; Ahala killed Maelius; and once the matter was settled, Cincinnatus again resigned and went home.

The record for 439 is later and thinner than the record for 458, and the sources do not all tell it the same way, so it is held here more lightly than the first. But the shape of it is the same: power taken at the city’s call, used, and handed straight back.

8. The judges of Israel, and the first king

Rome was not the first people to answer the problem of power this way. Centuries earlier, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Israel did the same thing — and then, unlike Rome, undid it.

After the escape from Egypt and the settling of the land, Israel had no king. For roughly two centuries it was led by judges — and the word misleads, because they were not men who sat in courts. They were deliverers, raised up one at a time when an enemy bore down on the people: the Moabites, the Canaanites, the Midianites, the Ammonites, the Philistines. In the crisis a leader rose — Othniel, Ehud, Deborah and Barak, Gideon, Jephthah, Samson — broke the oppressor, and gave the people peace. Then the office ended with the emergency. “The land had rest forty years,” the account repeats, and the judge went back to being one of the people. No standing throne, no fixed capital, no dynasty. The emergency ruler who stands down when the danger is past — the same shape Rome would give its master of the people six hundred years later.

It has its own Cincinnatus moment, and a sharper one. After Gideon broke the Midianites, the people offered him the crown and a line to follow it: “Rule over us, you and your son and your grandson.” He refused it flat — “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you; the LORD shall rule over you.” The deliverer who would not turn the rescue into a throne. And the warning sits in the text right beside it: Gideon’s son Abimelech seized the kingship his father had refused, murdered his brothers to take it, and was dead in blood within three years — the bad king with no off-switch, told as a story.

The turn came when the people asked for a permanent king. They went to the aged judge Samuel and said: give us a king to rule us, “like all the nations.” And so Saul was anointed the first king of Israel: Samuel poured the oil on his head and named him the chosen of God. From that hour he was the LORD’s anointed — in Hebrew mashiach, the word that becomes Messiah, and in Greek Christos, Christ. The king was set apart and sacred, the LORD’s own choice — and still a man, who could be rebuked by the prophet, rejected, and killed in battle, as Saul in the end would be.

The mirror with Rome is exact, and reversed. Israel began with no king and asked for one, against the warning, and was given Saul. Rome began with kings, threw them off, and built its Republic so that no man would hold permanent power again. Two peoples facing the single question — should one man hold the throne for good? — and walking away from it in opposite directions, each leaving a long record of unease about the crown.

9. The office, kept and broken

The Republic’s bet — keep one-man command, lose its permanence — held for about four and a half centuries. A master of the people was named, did the task, and stepped down, time after time, as Cincinnatus had. The fence did its work.

By the late Republic the office went by two names. Its old and formal title was the one Cincinnatus held: magister populi, master of the people. Its everyday name was dictator — from dicere, to speak: the man whose word was law. Neither word yet meant a tyrant. Cicero, writing as the Republic was dying, still used the dignified title to shame the men who had disgraced the office: a just man, he wrote, deserves the name master of the people far more than Sulla ever did — Sulla being a master only of luxury, greed and cruelty.

Then the fence failed, at the very end, and fast. Sulla had himself named to the office in 82 BC with no six-month limit, used the power to kill his enemies and rewrite the constitution, and only then stepped down. Julius Caesar went further: in 44 BC he was made dictator perpetuo — for life. The cap that had defined the office since the founding of the Republic was simply gone. He was killed within weeks, by men who said they were saving the Republic. They were too late; the wars that followed finished it, and Caesar’s heir Augustus became, in all but the name, a king.

The word never recovered. What had once named the farmer called from his plough came — through Sulla and Caesar, and through the tyrants who studied them twenty centuries later — to mean its own opposite. The man who held the office for sixteen days and the men who would not let go of it share a single word. The difference between them is the whole of statecraft.

So Rome came full circle. It had run from one bad king into a Republic built to make permanent one-man rule impossible — and four and a half centuries later it walked back into one-man rule under the emperors. And the same old problem was waiting where it had left it. The empire ran well under a good emperor and badly under a bad one, and it never solved the thing the Republic had run from in the first place: when the power is permanent, there is no off-switch for the bad man. A good king is the best government there is. The trouble was never the good king. The trouble was always the next one.

10. The American Cincinnatus

Which is why a man at a plough was remembered for two and a half thousand years — and why, when a new republic was founded across an ocean, its makers reached for him by name.

George Washington had won the Revolutionary War and held the loyalty of the army. He could have kept both. Instead, in December 1783, he resigned his commission to the Congress and went home to farm his land at Mount Vernon — the plough, exactly. The act astonished the world: King George III is said to have remarked that if Washington gave up power he would be the greatest man in the world. He gave it up a second time, declining a third term as president and going home again, and each time the figure the new nation reached for was the Roman who had done the same thing on a small farm across the Tiber.

The officers who had served under Washington formed, in 1783, the Society of the Cincinnati, and made him its first president, an office he held until his death in 1799. They named themselves for Cincinnatus deliberately, and took as their motto a line that is his whole life in four words: Omnia reliquit servare rempublicam — “he gave up everything to save the Republic.” Their emblem shows the scene from this memo: Cincinnatus receiving the sword from the senators, his wife at the cottage door, the plough on the ground at his feet.

And the name spread to the map. In 1788 a settlement went up on the north bank of the Ohio River, opposite the mouth of the Licking, under the made-up name Losantiville — L for the Licking, os for the Latin “mouth,” anti for the Greek “opposite,” ville for the town: “the town opposite the mouth of the Licking.” In 1790 the governor of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair — himself a member of the Society of the Cincinnati — struck the awkward name out and renamed the place Cincinnati, after the Society, and through it after the Roman. A great inland city of nineteenth-century America carried the name of a man who had ruled Rome for sixteen days and then gone back to his field.

The plough is the point. Cincinnatus went back to it; Washington went back to Mount Vernon; and a republic that wanted to remember what power held in trust looks like took the farmer’s name and set it on a city. The hardest thing in government is to give the power back. He did it — and they never forgot.