Greetings from the city of the Cincinnati, and as today is the anniversary of the assassination of Caligula, January 24, 41 CE, it seems appropriate to speak of dictators and tyrants.  Don’t let our moniker “The Queen City” fool you.  We’d brook th’ eternal devil to keep his state in Cincinnati as easily as a king.  We’re named after a group of Revolutionary War officers who pledged to return to public service after the war if their country needed them.  The Society of the Cincinnati was founded in 1783 in Fishkill, NY at a meeting chaired by Lieutenant Alexander Hamilton.  The Society of the Cincinnati, in turn, took its name from the Roman Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who in 458 BCE dropped his plow and took up the office of dictator and the duty of defending his country.  In contrast to our modern usage of the word, the dictatorship was a constitutional office in ancient Rome, so although Cincinnatus was given broad powers to address the emergency at hand, he was constrained by the office’s 6-month term limit.  No worry for Cincinnatus; he defeated the enemy army, saved Rome, and rather than cling to power he handed over his extensive authority in fifteen days’ time and went back to plowing his fields – mission accomplished.  That’s something we don’t see too much these days; it’s called serving the common good.    In recognition of this, we are proudly named Cincinnati and over time we’ve erected a few memorials to Cincinnatus.  At times serious:

            At times humorous – one of our other monikers is Porkopolis; check it out Chicago, we too were hog-butcher to the world once.

            And for all this, I don’t begrudge Councilman Chris Seelbach calling into question the Eden Park Capitoline Wolf, which was a gift of the Fascist Benito Mussolini in 1931, or the year X if you prefer to count as Mussolini did from the start of Fascist rule.  As I wrote in my piece in the Cincinnati Enquirer, I too was disappointed to learn the statue was a gift of a dictator.  The Eden Park Capitoline Wolf is a beautiful replica of an iconic ancient Roman statue, which represents legitimate political authority and adversity in the face of tyranny, something Mussolini knew or cared little about. 

The statue depicts Romulus and Remus, who Moses like were cast into the Tiber River by their mother Rhea Silvia so that they might escape Amulius, the usurper of the throne.  Those boys survived, and when they grew up, they drove Amulius out and restored the rightful king Numitor, their grandfather.  They would go on to found Rome.

            In my opinion, the statue should stay and likely will.  The city has matters more pressing to address than the provenance of this statue.  Besides, Mussolini was a fool for not understanding its true meaning; for not living by its lessons, he was a tyrant. 

            That said, it is appropriate to engage in the discussion.  Public monuments are a thorny matter.  We know that some are willing to kill and others to die for the maintenance or removal of a public monument.  I wonder what are the rules for public monuments.  Why do we erect them?  Who owns them?  Who decides if they stay or go, and how is it decided?  I have some fast responses to these questions, but it requires further thought on my part for I fear it is more complex than I understand.

Resources

The founding of Rome was a wild time.  Check out Livy Book One for the standard account.

For Cincinnatus, see Livy Book 3 chapters 26-29.

George Washington has often been hailed as a Cincinnatus figure.  See Gary Wills, American Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment.

For more discussion on the history of the Eden Park Capitoline Wolf and the current conversation, see Corey Brennan’s “In Cincinnati, a sculpture gifted in 1931 by Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi draws new scrutiny.”