The Stoic Art Of DISAPPEARING At The RIGHT Moment

It was the fifth century before Christ, long before the Empire, when Rome was still a small republic surrounded by enemies.

It wasn't the city of marble we picture.

It was a cluster of hills, modest temples and houses of mud and timber on the banks of a river, with hostile peoples just a few hours' march away.

Every spring there was war, and inside the city, the patricians and the common people fought without rest over the laws and over power.

In the middle of those quarrels, our hero appears, Lucius Quinctius, known as Cincinnatius, which means something like the curly-haired one.

He was a patrician from an old family, a stern man, one of those who stood up for the old order.

And he had a son, Saeso, who, according to the historian Livy, was tall, strong, a fine speaker, and rather violent.

Saeso made a habit of confronting the tribunes of the people in the forum with his fists if need be, and he made a great many enemies.

One day he was accused before the people.

A former tribune, Marcus Volscius, testified that Saso and his friends had attacked him and his sick brother in the open street, and that the brother had died shortly afterwards.

The city was ablaze.

So that Saso could await his trial at liberty, several guarantors pledged to pay a heavy sum if he failed to appear.

Livy says it was the first time such a thing had been done in Rome.

and Sayso didn't appear.

He fled to Etruria, into exile.

The debt fell on his father.

Cincinnatus had to sell almost everything he owned to pay the guarantors, and he withdrew with his wife to a small farm on the far side of the Tiber, where he lived in a cottage and worked the land with his own hands.

Livy says the plot measured about four iugera, barely a hectare.

A former nobleman of Rome, ruined by his son's actions, plowing like a peasant, and not a word of complaint.

Then came the great emergency.

A Roman army under the consul Minucius had been trapped by a neighboring people, the Aequi, on Mount Algidus in the hills southeast of Rome.

The Aequi had hemmed them in with an earthen rampart.

They couldn't get out.

Their food was running low.

According to Livy, only a handful of horsemen managed to break through and gallop to Rome with the news.