Cincinnatus

And the reason why I am, go back to our founders.

If you want to spend some time digging in to the greatest of our founding fathers, and that's George Washington, who could have been king, but he took the Cincinnatus route.

He was as pro-public execution as I think anybody else in history, and this is why, is because he knew what it would do to the collective psyche of the body politic.

What I mean by that, and I remember this, my wife and I got married in Jamaica, Negril, Jamaica, back in 2009.

The patrician families, led by one Caeso Caeso Quinctius, made bitter opposition.

Caeso himself, son of the famous Cincinnatus, was impeached by the tribune and fled from the city.

Finally it was arranged that the comitia centuriata should select from the people at large 10 men called the decemvirate to hold office once a year to direct the government and supersede all other magistrates, and especially to draw up a code of laws to be submitted to the people for approval.

A commission of these patricians was sent to Athens to examine the laws of that city, which was now in 454 at the height of its prosperity.

In 458 the Romans were hard pressed by the Aequi.

Their territory had been overrun, and their consuls, cut off in some defiles, were in imminent danger of destruction.

Lucius Quinctus Cincinnatus was appointed dictator.

He was one of the most noted Roman warriors of this period.

But if you could create a tradition or a practice around it, people would follow.

And his decision to resign his commission first in the army and then to resign the presidency, first off, that's rooted in the example of Cincinnatus.

It goes all the way back to the Romans.

But that's a tradition that lasts all the way until Roosevelt, which is pretty crazy.

That was the most radical move for him.

You know, the society of Cincinnatus, the sense of Cincinnati, right? And being able to put down your rifle, pick up your plow, and go back to being a citizen.

Washington was able to do that.

Right.

The It's how rare men of that caliber are.

Cincinnatus of Rome, the great Roman general who saved the Republic twice and then went back to his farm, gave back power because almost nobody gives back power.

That's why the Society of Cincinnatus was a big deal back in the day.

By the way, I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

So then the Fourth Republic was 1946 to 1958, established after World War II with the parliamentary system, ended due to political instability and the Algerian crisis.

And we are told how in the beginning...

it came to pass that like cabbaging Cincinnatus, who's that? Well, here's an example of the absolute density of knowledge that lurks behind every line of the wake.

Cincinnatus was a Roman dictator who left the position to return to his cabbage garden.

He just wanted to hoe away and tend to his vegetables.

So seriously, every line in this work offers us an avenue to go explore and to learn something about history and art and language.

Yeah.

This is how you get men like Cincinnati's.

It's thinking like

this.