Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c-519 - c-430). Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was a Roman patrician, statesman, and military leader of the early Roman Republic who became a legendary figure of Roman virtue, particularly civic virtue, by the time of the late Republic. Cincinnatus was an opponent of the rights of the plebeians who fell into poverty because of his son Caeso Quinctius's violent opposition to their desire for a written code of equally enforced laws. Despite his relatively old age, he worked his own small farm until an invasion prompted his fellow citizens to call for his leadership. He came from his plough to assume complete control over the state but, upon achieving a swift victory in only 16 days, relinquished his power and its perquisites and returned to his farm. His success and immediate resignation of his near-absolute authority with the end of this crisis has often been cited as an example of outstanding leadership, service to the greater good, civic virtue, humility, and modesty. Modern historians question some particulars of the story recounted in Livy and elsewhere but usually accept Cincinnatus as a historical figure who served as suffect consul in 460BC and as dictator in 458BC and again in 439BC, when the patricians called on him to suppress the feared uprising of the plebeians under Spurius Maelius, after which he is said to have once again ceded power. According to the traditional accounts, Lucius would have been born about 519BC, during the last decade of the Roman Kingdom. He would have been a member of the ancient patrician clan Quinctia, which predated the founding of Rome and was moved to Rome from the Latin city of Alba Longa by Tullus Hostilius. The clan's first consul was Titus Quinctius Capitolinus Barbatus, elected in 471BC. As both Titus and Lucius are recorded as the son and grandson of men named Lucius Quinctius, Titus is sometimes thought to have been Lucius's brother. This suggests Lucius was the first of his cognomen, meaning the curly haired. The family was rich. In the late 460sBC, Rome was fending off raids by the Aequi to their east and, beginning in 462BC, the tribune G. Terentilius Harsa began pressing for codification of the Roman laws in order to establish a kind of constitution that would check the near-regal power of the patrician consuls. In the years that followed, he and the other plebeians were ignored, fended off, rejected on procedural grounds, and finally beaten and driven from the streets by gangs of patricians and their clients, supposedly including Cincinnatus's son Caeso. The violent resistance of the patricians prompted so much unrest that Appius Herdonius was able to seize the Capitoline Hill and hold it against the city with a gang of outlaws and rebel slaves or with an army of Sabines. The consul Publius Valerius Poplicola was killed in its recovery in 460BC and Cincinnatus, probably illegally, became the suffect consul for the remainder of the year. Cincinnatus was himself a violent opponent of the plebs' proposal, which made no progress during his administration. His son was supposedly driven from town and killed for his murder of a plebeian. Cincinnatus quit the city and retired to an estate he held to the west of the Tiber. Cincinnatus served as dictator, a king-like figure appointed by the Republic in times of extreme emergency, in 458 or 457BC in order to lead reinforcements to the defense of the Roman army under the consul L. Minucius Esquilinus Augurinus at Mount Algidus.