Clinging to the Plough

Cincinnatus was, as yesterday's editorial in the Grauniad noted, one of the Roman Republic's great cultural heroes, the man who was busy ploughing his own fields when the delegation arrived to ask him to take up the dictatorship and save Rome from its enemies, and who laid down absolute power the moment the crisis was over, just as he was supposed to. Agriculture, war and civic duty, the perfect combination of Roman aristocratic virtues, and Cincinnatus' descendents proudly claimed him as an exemplum for their own lives - even if their involvement in farming was confined to owning a lot of farms, cultivated by slaves and tendants, and their wars were about booty and territorial expansion rather than the defense of Rome.

The Guardian writer is astute enough to distinguish between the myth of Cincinnatus, as told by Livy and others, and the reality (his extreme conservatism, for example) - but we might ask whether even the myth is such a good example for modern politicans as the editorial claims. Cincinnatus was scarcely an amateur who "did his bit then quit": his entire adult life, up to the consulship he held two years before being appointed dictator, had been spent in politics, working his way up the greasy pole not in order to put his convictions into action but for the glory and power. True, Roman aristocrats didn't just do politics, in the way that today's 'policy wonk to MP' crowd seem to have known no other life; they interspersed periods of office with military service, equally driven by the opportunities for glory and enrichment. The fact that Rome's decision-making was dominated by those who had shown equal abilities in deviousness and killing people may perhaps help account for the city's chronic inability to get along with its neighbours without conquering or subjugating them.

It's only under the later Republic, so afflicted by a sense of its inadequacy and decadence compared with the great and virtuos heroes of the past, that we find senators with a genuine life outside the traditional pursuit of power: senators with an interest in art, literature, philosophy and science. But of course they could do this because of the leisure afforded by vast independent wealth, wich doesn't leave us any closer to finding useful role models for today's politicians in the history of Rome, tempting as it always is to lay some sort of claim to that legacy...