Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 63

Marcus Porcius Cato ‘the younger’, the stern republican martyr who opposed Julius Caesar throughout the dictator’s stormy path to power, was the most popular and admired Roman hero during the war years (1775–1783). However, once the fighting ended, Cato’s uncompromising and suicidal struggle, and eventual defeat, was of little use for the hustle and bustle of post-war American realities. Once the war was over it was another Roman, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who replaced Cato as the embodiment of the ideal republican figure in America. If Cato was the perfect inspirational model in times of war, Cincinnatus symbolised demobilisation, subordination of the armed forces to civil powers and the moral superiority and virtuous simplicity of those who toil the land. This transference from favouring Cato to a preference for Cincinnatus may be seen at its clearest with regard to George Washington. After the commander of the Continental Army, who was referred to as ‘the American Cato’, emerged victorious he retired to his Potomac estate and was quickly hailed as America’s Cincinnatus.¹²

According to tradition, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was called from the plough and appointed dictator when the Aequi surrounded the Roman army in 458 BCE (see e.g. Livy. 3.26–29). After defeating them he laid down his office and returned to his ploughing. His voluntary acts of becoming a soldier, leaving his ideal farm to wage war, as he was called from his oxen and plough, and then divesting himself of dictatorial power in order to return to his pastoral realm, were universally admired. Cincinnatus’s actions further connoted a frugal resistance to temptation and the superiority of peasants over city dwellers, of Country over Court. It was not so much Cincinnatus’s historical importance that made him a significant symbol in American minds (he is a rather indistinct figure in ancient historiography), but rather his combination of virtues that turned him into a significant emblem. Encapsulating the ideals of early modern republicanism, that of a disinterested, agrarian, virtuous citizen, Cincinnatus epitomised the integrity that could sustain a republic. Frugality, agrarianism, patriotism and military fortitude, but mainly the marvellous surrender to civilian power and the lack of personal ambition, made him the perfect standard to apply to George Washington, as well as to a train of later Americans.

Even before the war had ended, juxtapositions of Washington and Cincinnatus commenced. Both military leaders were believed to have departed from the plough to save their countries from dire straits, and to have surrendered their power to civil authority, only to return to their pastoral farms. An Epistle from 1781 claimed that Washington, like Cincinnatus, rose ‘when of old, from his paternal farm/Rome bade her rigid Cincinnatus arm; Th’ illustrious peasant rushes to the field, Soon are the haughty Volsii taught to yield…His country sav’d, the solemn triumph o’er, He tills his native acres as before’ (Wharton 1781: 7). Such occasional references to the Cincinnatan image during the war were systematically elaborated once the fighting was over. After the Revolution, Washington performed multiple retirements: first in 1783 as commander of the Continental Army, followed by his return to the public eye in 1787 and his final retreat from the presidency in 1796 to Mount Vernon. These elaborate public acts were deliberate attempts on Washington’s behalf to promote this perceived relationship between his conduct and that of Cincinnatus.

Hence, contemporaries repeatedly addressed Washington as ‘like’, ‘the modern’, the ‘second’ and ‘the American’ Cincinnatus. Captain Josiah Dunham described in private correspondence how Washington ‘great, like CINCINATUS, returned to the plough’ (Schwartz 1986: 208). Characteristically, the Georgian William Pierce elaborated during the framing of the Federal Constitution, that Washington:

like Cincinnatus…returned to his farm perfectly contented with being only a plain citizen after enjoying the highest honor of the Confederacy, and now only seeks for the approbation of his country-men by being virtuous and useful. (Brookhiser 1996: 59–60)

Similarly, on his 56th birthday, the citizens of Wilmington, Delaware, drank a toast to ‘Farmer Washington – may he, like a second Cincinnatus, be called from the plow to rule a great people’ (Wright 1995: 161). Throughout Washington’s political career, the voluntary retirement, the withdrawal to rural life, the saving of one’s country and the suppression of personal wishes for the sake of the public good were represented as the shared virtues of the Roman and the American and were hailed as the noblest qualities of a republican citizen.

Washington’s Cincinnatan image became vastly popular in diverse genres, from patriotic poetry (Philip Freneau’s poem ‘Cincinnatus’, for instance, described the American general and Roman dictator as both retiring from war to their ‘sylvan shades’) to visual and plastic arts, such as paintings by Charles Wilson Peale and John Trumbull, showing Washington as Cincinnatus (unfortunately lost, although descriptions remain; see Kaminski and McCaughan, 1989: 33; Wills 1984: 13). The epitome of such artistic representations was Washington’s magisterial statue by the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, now placed in the Richmond Capitol, a magnanimous example of the cultivation of the Cincinnatan symbol in America, in which the retiring president rests his arm on the Roman fasces, standing in front of his plough (Kammen 1978: 85).

A lasting effect of Washington’s enactment of a Cincinnatan role was the pattern of a formulaic posture of retirement for a whole generation of revolutionary-era leaders in which they ritualised the retreat to the countryside and their retirements into a Cincinnatan performance (Jones 1964: 246). The list of self-proclaimed Cincinnati consisted of great men, as well as of lesser figures, all but forgotten over the years (one example being Judge Henry Sanford’s retirement to his farm in New York; see Reinhold 1984: 161). Already in 1776, John Adams expressed his desire to ‘retreat like Cincinnatus … and farewell Politicks’, aware that ‘it seems the mode of becoming great is to retire’ (Richard 1994: 55; Ellis 2000: 123). Once retired, the second President was indeed compared with Cincinnatus, among other ancient figures (Richard 1994: 68). Thomas Jefferson kept idolsing ‘my family, my farms, and my books’ and never stopped furnishing and redesigning his remote Monticello retreat. In 1809, as his second presidential term came to its conclusion, he wrote, ‘never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power’ (Leuchtenburg 2000). Relieved of his duties, he spent his final years in stoic leisure at Monticello. John Jay, ‘the Cincinnatus of New York’ and the nation’s first Secretary of State, was preoccupied in his retreat with his own Roman virtue, while James Madison’s retirement to his Montpellier estate closely resembled Washington’s retreat to Mount Vernon and Jefferson’s withdrawal to Monticello (Reinhold 1984: 161). Many other lesser figures followed that Cincinnatan example.