Laborare est Orare — “To Work is to Pray”
In Alexandre Cabanel’s Cincinnatus Receiving Deputies of the Senate (1843), time seems suspended between two worlds: the quiet rhythm of the field and the restless urgency of the state. Beneath a Roman sky, the farmer stands at his plow, sun-worn and unadorned, as a delegation of senators approaches. The oxen pause mid-step; the soil clings to the blade. In that moment, Cabanel captures a moral pivot, the instant when private life meets public duty.
“Art is a moral act,” Cabanel once wrote, “for it gives visible form to the invisible order of the soul.” His canvas is thus not merely an historical reconstruction, but a meditation on virtue itself. The artist’s brush dramatizes the question that has haunted every republic: Can power remain pure? In the gleam of Cincinnatus’s arm and the humility of his gesture, Cabanel paints a visual answer—strength joined with restraint, authority tempered by integrity.
The scene draws from Livy’s account: “When the messengers arrived, they found Cincinnatus plowing his four-acre farm. Clad in the toga of peace, he wiped the sweat from his brow as he listened to the call of Rome.” In this simple act—wiping his hands before receiving power—Rome saw the measure of a man. Dionysius of Halicarnassus would later write, “He was the image of old-fashioned Roman virtue: poor in possessions, rich in honor.” Such words echo through Cabanel’s composition: the rough field becomes an emblem of moral clarity, the senators’ silks a reminder of luxury’s fragility.
Cato the Elder once observed that “the toil of the field purifies man of the arrogance of the city.” Virgil, in his Georgics, praised the farmer as “greatly blessed, if only he knew his good.” For the Romans, the land was not merely livelihood, it was the crucible of character. Labor itself was a form of prayer, laborare est orare, a spiritual discipline through which one learned humility and endurance. Cabanel’s Cincinnatus embodies this sanctity of labor; his body glows not with divine favor but with the honest light of effort.
Yet there is also hesitation in his stance. There is a psychological realism that elevates the work beyond didacticism. He is not eager to rule. “The good ruler is reluctant to rule,” writes Lao Tzu, and in this reluctance lies true virtue. Cincinnatus’s strength is not in conquest, but in his willingness to relinquish power. As Jung later reflected, “A man’s worth is not measured by what he conquers, but by what he is willing to relinquish.”
Cabanel’s painting, then, becomes a mirror for the viewer. It becomes a reminder that leadership is a form of service and that service begins in humility. Cicero declared, “He who wishes to serve his country must be willing to forget himself.” In the same spirit, Cabanel’s brush constructs not only a Roman hero but an ideal of the self-governing citizen, one whose virtue arises from inner discipline rather than outward glory.
Standing before this work today, I am drawn less to the senators than to the soil at Cincinnatus’s feet. The furrowed earth reminds me that the moral foundation of any republic must be tilled by those who labor honestly, who take up duty when called and return to simplicity when the work is done. Plato’s words linger behind the composition: “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”
Through this union of art and philosophy, Cabanel transforms legend into lesson. “Painting is silent poetry,” Simonides wrote, “and poetry is painting that speaks.” Cabanel’s Cincinnatus speaks in the silent language of virtue: a call to remember that the health of the state depends upon the humility of its citizens.
Imperium ex Aratro — Power from the Plow
The legend of Cincinnatus begins not with triumph, but with interruption. According to Livy, “When the messengers of the Senate came to deliver their decree, they found him at the plow, and he bade his wife to fetch his toga before he would listen to their words.” In that small gesture, the act of dressing himself properly before addressing the affairs of the state, lies the moral nucleus of the Roman Republic. Cincinnatus did not reject authority; he prepared himself for it. He did not seize power; he received it as a burden of necessity.
To the Roman imagination, this act fused two worlds: labor and imperium. The man who could guide the furrow could also guide the state. The plow became the instrument of legitimacy, proof that the man who could order the earth could order men. Dionysius of Halicarnassus described him as “the image of ancient virtue, lord of himself before lord of others.” In that phrase—se dominus ante alios dominus—resides the Roman conviction that mastery begins within.
Roman historians never intended the story of Cincinnatus to be pastoral nostalgia. It was moral instruction. The early Republic, emerging from the shadow of monarchy, defined itself by moderation and restraint. Power was not an inheritance but a temporary trust. As Cicero later insisted in De Republica, “The welfare of the people is the supreme law” (Salus populi suprema lex esto), a principle that demanded the powerful act as stewards, not sovereigns.
In psychological terms, Cincinnatus stands as an archetype of what Jung would later call the Servant King: the man who integrates authority with humility. He represents the ego’s reconciliation with the collective: leadership that does not dominate but harmonizes. His willingness to relinquish power after victory, the very act that immortalized him, shows what Seneca called imperium in se ipsum, the rule over oneself. “No man is free who is not master of himself,” Seneca wrote, and Cincinnatus, in abdicating command, embodied that freedom.
The legend also exposes a profound tension at the heart of republican identity: the desire for leadership and the fear of its corruption. Rome had known kings and would never again tolerate one. The office of dictator, granted absolute authority for a limited time, was a civic safeguard, not a crown. Cincinnatus became the moral prototype for that arrangement: the citizen who accepts absolute power only to surrender it voluntarily. In the simplicity of his withdrawal, the Romans found their highest reassurance: that virtue could govern without ambition.
This is what the phrase imperium ex aratro truly signifies: not conquest, but order drawn from the soil. The Roman plow cut more than furrows; it cut boundaries, established the first measure of the Republic’s self-discipline. Livy’s story is therefore not a rustic interlude, but the moral genesis of Roman statecraft. To rule justly, one must begin in humility; to command others, one must have first learned to command oneself.
Cabanel’s painting translates this moral geometry into light and form. The senators’ togas gleam with political authority, but the true radiance falls upon the farmer. The earth beneath his feet becomes both literal ground and ethical foundation. His body, half in shadow, half in sunlight, mirrors the human condition. That eternal struggle to hold power without being possessed by it.
In that moment, as Cincinnatus stands between the plow and the Republic, we witness not the rise of a ruler, but the consecration of service. Imperium ex aratro—power from the plow—remains one of civilization’s oldest reminders that authority, to endure, must grow from the humility of labor.
Rusticus Romanus Sum — I Am a Roman of the Soil
If the myth of Cincinnatus gave Rome its moral hero, the life of the farmer gave it its soul. To be a rusticus Romanus was not a mark of poverty, but of purity. The land, in Roman thought, was both livelihood and liturgy, the field a small republic where order was learned and virtue practiced.
Cato the Elder, in his De Agri Cultura, begins not with methods but with morality. “When you buy land,” he writes, “you buy a way of life.” To till the soil was to participate in the first and most enduring contract between human effort and divine providence. Agriculture was not simply productive labor; it was ethical cultivation. The field trained the mind in patience, temperance, and foresight: the very virtues the Republic required of its citizens. Cicero later echoed this in De Officiis, declaring, “Of all occupations by which gain is secured, none is better, none more productive, none more worthy of a free man than agriculture.”
Virgil, writing centuries later in the Georgics, turned this agrarian morality into poetry. “O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona norint, agricolas!” — “O greatly blessed are the farmers, if they but knew their good.” The line reads like a benediction, not merely upon those who labor, but upon the condition of simplicity itself. For Virgil, the plow was not a tool of toil alone, but a means of aligning one’s life with nature’s order, of finding harmony between the human and the eternal.
This harmony was central to the Roman concept of virtus, a word whose meaning lies between “virtue,” “strength,” and “manliness.” True virtus was not inherited but earned, through discipline, endurance, and service. The farmer, bound by the seasons, practiced virtus daily: rising early, confronting hardship, laboring not for glory but necessity. His fields were an education in proportion. An education in knowing what was enough.
The Roman agrarian ideal thus joined the philosophical with the psychological. It satisfied what modern psychology might call the archetype of the caretaker: one whose identity is rooted in nurture and stewardship. The soil mirrored the psyche: both must be tended, pruned, and renewed. In this sense, farming was a sacred therapy against excess, a means to maintain equilibrium in a culture ever tempted by expansion and empire. Seneca warned of that danger when he wrote, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” The field, with its finite boundaries and daily rhythms, reminded Rome of the wisdom of limits.
Even in the Republic’s later centuries, when wealth flowed from conquest and villas replaced small farms, the image of the humble cultivator persisted as a moral ideal. To the Roman mind, the state itself was an enlarged farm: its citizens the laborers, its magistrates the stewards, its laws the furrows that maintained order. The decay of these virtues — greed, corruption, the abandonment of honest work — was seen as the first sign of a failing republic.
Cabanel’s Cincinnatus stands, then, not as an exception but as the exemplar of this agrarian moral vision. His call to power is the flowering of a long cultural faith: that the man closest to the earth stands closest to truth. The soil clinging to his feet is not dirt but consecration.
To declare Rusticus Romanus sum — I am a Roman of the soil — was to affirm a civic and spiritual identity. It was to say, I belong to the earth that sustains the Republic, and therefore, the Republic belongs to me. It was a declaration of interdependence between labor and liberty.
When I think of this ideal, I see again the moment in Cabanel’s painting where the plow meets the marble of the senators’ sandals. Two civilizations touch there: the world of work and the world of governance. It is a meeting that must forever be renewed if a republic is to endure.
Virtus in Actione Consistit — Virtue Consists in Action
Cicero wrote, “Virtus in actione consistit” — virtue consists in action. It was not enough for the Roman to think nobly; he had to act nobly. For the ancients, ethics was not contemplation but embodiment, and Cincinnatus stood as the living measure of that principle. The legend endured precisely because it was kinetic. It was an image of movement from field to forum, from plow to power, from self to service.
When the Renaissance revived the moral literature of antiquity, Cincinnatus returned as an exemplar of civic humanism. Petrarch, who sought to reconcile the active and contemplative lives, saw in him the perfect fusion of both: the scholar of the soil who answers the call of duty and then returns to the quiet of thought. The Florentines, struggling to balance liberty and order, read Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita not merely as history but as a manual for republics. In Cincinnatus, they found an image of what Niccolò Machiavelli would later call virtù, that blend of strength, prudence, and moral resolve by which a citizen preserves the state without becoming its tyrant.
Art, too, became the vehicle of this moral continuity. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, frescoes and reliefs of Cincinnatus appeared in the civic halls of Florence, Venice, and Siena. The selfsame places where merchants, magistrates, and citizens debated the future of their republics. He was portrayed not as a hero of conquest but as a man of measure: sleeves rolled, head bowed, the plow beside him. These images were less adornment than instruction, visual treatises on the duties of citizenship.
By the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers had transformed the Roman ideal into a secular creed. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, praised the ancient republic for its “love of equality and virtue.” Rousseau would write in his Discourse on Inequality, “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Yet even as Rousseau lamented property’s corruption, he admired Cincinnatus as the exception: the man who took power not to possess it, but to return it.
The Enlightenment’s fascination with Cincinnatus was not antiquarian nostalgia; it was political aspiration. As Europe’s monarchies strained under the weight of privilege, the Roman myth offered a model for moral authority rooted in service rather than sovereignty. To invoke Cincinnatus was to imagine a world where character outranked class, where moral strength was the measure of legitimacy.
Cabanel inherited this legacy. By the time he painted Cincinnatus Receiving Deputies of the Senate, the Roman farmer had become both symbol and mirror, a way for modern republics to contemplate their origins and their ideals. The mid-nineteenth century, riven by revolutions and the rise of empire, looked backward for guidance. Cabanel’s academic rigor, his sculptural figures and luminous color, belong to that neoclassical impulse that sought moral stability in the aesthetic order of antiquity.
And yet, there is something more than nostalgia in Cabanel’s composition. He does not idealize Rome as perfect; he idealizes the moment of choice. The senators lean forward in expectation; Cincinnatus hesitates, poised between obedience and independence. The moral drama is psychological as much as historical. It is an enactment of what Viktor Frankl would later call the moment of meaning: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose.”
In this sense, Cabanel’s painting is not merely about the past but about the perpetual act of becoming virtuous. Virtus in actione consistit. Virtue does not rest in the field or in the forum, but in the passage between them. It is a movement — outward toward duty, inward toward conscience — and it must be repeated in every age.
If the Renaissance frescoes urged the citizen to act, and the Enlightenment philosophers to reason, Cabanel urges the modern self to remember. His brush restores to view the luminous center of an ancient moral equation: that the strength of the Republic lies not in its institutions, but in the character of those willing to rise from the furrows when the Republic calls.
E Pluribus Unum — Out of Many, One
When the framers of the American Republic chose the motto E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—they drew from Virgil’s poem Moretum, where the phrase describes the blending of diverse herbs into a single, harmonious whole. The sentiment was agrarian at its core: unity born from cultivation, from the patient mixing of earth’s elements into sustenance. It was a phrase Rome itself would have understood, and perhaps Cincinnatus would have smiled at its simplicity.
For the generation of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, Rome was not distant antiquity. Rome was precedent and warning. They read Livy and Cicero not as historians but as mentors, their Latin maxims adorning private letters and public speeches. In the libraries of colonial Virginia and New England, one could find dog-eared copies of De Officiis, The Republic, and Plutarch’s Lives. Washington himself kept Addison’s tragedy Cato in his collection and quoted its lines of stoic patriotism to his officers at Valley Forge. “What pity is it,” Addison wrote, “that we can die but once to serve our country.”
The founders saw in Cincinnatus the model of the virtuous citizen. They saw a man who wields authority as necessity, not ambition. When the Revolutionary War ended, and Washington resigned his commission before Congress in Annapolis, the world recognized the gesture as classical reenactment. The historian David Humphreys wrote, “The example of Cincinnatus is revived in the person of Washington.” The comparison was not flattery but philosophy: power, rightly held, must end in renunciation.
Even the Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783 by officers of the Continental Army, made this lineage explicit. Its insignia depicted Cincinnatus leaving his plow to accept the command of the Senate, and then returning to his fields. Its Latin motto—Omnia reliquit servare rempublicam (“He left all to serve the Republic”)—encapsulated the moral aspiration of the new nation: that republican virtue could transcend centuries, that America might inherit Rome’s civic spirit without its corruption.
Yet, as historian Carl Richard has observed, the founders’ Roman model was double-edged. Rome offered lessons not only in virtue but in decay. Adams feared the fate of the Republic that had succumbed to its own ambition, writing that “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Jefferson, for all his agrarian idealism, understood the tension between liberty and empire. The Romans’ reverence for the soil mirrored his own belief that the yeoman farmer was the backbone of democracy: self-sufficient, rational, and morally independent. “Cultivators of the earth,” he wrote, “are the most valuable citizens.”
Rome thus became both mirror and map for the new Republic. Its architecture—domes, columns, porticoes—rose again in marble and white stone on the banks of the Potomac. Its language, mottos, and ceremonies infused American political life with the aura of antiquity. But beneath the neoclassical façades lay the old moral question: could power remain pure when transferred from myth to reality, from Cincinnatus’s field to Washington’s republic?
Cabanel’s painting, viewed through this American lens, becomes prophetic. The senators in their togas might as easily be read as delegates of a fledgling congress; the farmer, as the Virginian general who, after victory, longed only to return to Mount Vernon’s fields. The plow, again, is both literal and symbolic. It is the tool that furrows the land and the conscience.
In this transatlantic passage from Rome to America, virtus becomes virtue, and the legend becomes aspiration. The moral economy of the plowman—discipline, humility, moderation—was reinterpreted as the foundation of republican freedom. What began in the dust of the Roman plain was reborn in the new world’s soil: imperium ex aratro once more.
E pluribus unum: from many states, one union; from many citizens, one Republic; from many labors, one liberty. Yet this unity, as both Rome and America remind us, must be renewed by the moral labor of each generation. The furrows of the Republic are not dug once, but forever.
Non sibi, sed patriae — Not for Self, but for Country
Cicero wrote, “He who serves the Republic serves himself best.” Yet the paradox of that service has haunted every generation: how to give without losing the self, how to hold authority without being consumed by it. The Romans called this balance pietas: the reverent duty to one’s gods, family, and country. In that word lay an ethic of belonging: that one’s life was meaningful only insofar as it contributed to something larger.
To stand before Cabanel’s Cincinnatus is to confront this ideal in its purest form. The man who turns from his plow to meet the Senate does not abandon himself; he extends himself. His labor simply changes form: from field to Republic, from earth to state. When his task is finished, he returns to the soil, not as defeat but as fulfillment. There is something profoundly psychological in that motion, a rhythm of engagement and retreat that mirrors the healthy ego’s relationship to the collective.
Seneca, who knew both court and exile, wrote, “A great mind becomes greater when it descends to serve.” This is the moral law of humility: that strength, to remain strength, must bow. In modern terms, Carl Jung would have recognized in Cincinnatus the archetype of the Servant King: the ruler who governs not through dominance, but through integration of the shadow, the acceptance that power must always yield to conscience. Jung wrote, “The true leader is not the man who seeks followers, but the man who awakens leadership in others.”
Leadership, at its highest, is a moral vocation. The Stoics believed that virtue was the only true good; all else—wealth, fame, command—were indifferent, valuable only in how they were used. Epictetus taught, “No man is free who is not master of himself.” In this sense, Cincinnatus’s renunciation of power was not withdrawal but mastery. He showed that the act of letting go can be the ultimate assertion of control.
This principle—non sibi, sed patriae—has guided republics, classrooms, and quiet acts of stewardship for centuries. It is not the motto of conquerors, but of caretakers. It reminds us that service is not a matter of occupation but orientation: a way of standing in relation to others. To serve well is to listen deeply, to teach patiently, to lead by example rather than decree.
For those of us who have spent decades in service—in education, in civic work, in the quiet leadership of institutions—the story of Cincinnatus feels deeply personal. There are days when the plow feels heavy, the field endless, the Senate’s summons unending. Yet the virtue lies not in the grandeur of the task, but in the steadiness of its doing. Teaching, like tending the soil, is a slow cultivation of trust and character. Its harvest is invisible until the season is long past.
I think of my own vocation as a kind of plowing: each lesson turned, each student guided, each policy shaped in the hope that something enduring might take root. There is humility in this rhythm: sowing where one may never see the bloom. Like Cincinnatus, the teacher-leader must learn to release the work once it is done, trusting that others will take up the furrow where he left off.
Kahlil Gibran wrote, “Work is love made visible.” That line might well hang beside Cabanel’s canvas. In it lies the final reconciliation of the private and public selves: the understanding that labor, when offered in love, becomes both prayer and politics, both individual meaning and communal good.
Non sibi, sed patriae. Not for self, but for country. It is the creed of the citizen, the teacher, the artist, and the farmer alike. The creed of those who, by tending their small patch of earth, sustain the moral soil of the Republic.
Ad Plenum Redire Circulum — To Return to the Full Circle
When we return to Cabanel’s Cincinnatus Receiving Deputies of the Senate, we see the same man, the same plow, the same Roman light. But now, the image feels fuller, its meaning harvested from all that history has layered upon it. The plow is no longer merely a tool of labor; it is the emblem of an eternal rhythm. Power rises from the soil and, in time, must return to it.
Seneca wrote, “Omnia in idem volvuntur”—everything turns back into itself. The circle of service and rest, of calling and return, is the moral shape of human life. In Cabanel’s painting, that circle is drawn in light: the curve of Cincinnatus’s arm echoing the arc of the plow, the line of the earth bending toward the horizon. The farmer will walk that furrow again when Rome no longer needs him, the senators long since departed. Duty fulfilled, he will resume his quiet work. Resume the rhythm of hands, earth, and breath restored.
There is a deep peace in that image. The heroic moment dissolves into the ordinary, and it is there, in the ordinary, that the Republic truly endures. Empires fall, but virtue remains in the soil. It remains in the small, repeated acts of cultivation that sustain community and conscience. Laborare est orare: to work is to pray. The circle closes where it began.
In this return, the painting becomes not only a historical allegory but a mirror of the human condition. We are all called, at times, from our private furrows to serve something greater. We rise, we labor, we lead, and then we return, changed, perhaps, but still ourselves. The wisdom lies not in escaping that cycle but in accepting it with grace.
For the Romans, the plow was the symbol of both foundation and humility. Romulus marked the boundaries of Rome with a plow, cutting the first sacred furrow of the city’s walls. Centuries later, Cincinnatus would lay down his plow only to lift it again. And in that gesture—laying down, taking up, returning—lies the continuity of civilization itself.
In modern life, the furrow may take other forms: the desk, the classroom, the committee table, the written word. But the rhythm remains. We plant what we may never harvest; we guide what will outlive us. As Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, “What we do now echoes in eternity.”
I find myself thinking of that each time I look upon Cabanel’s painting: the farmer in sunlight, the senators in shadow, the faint shimmer of dust in the air. It is a painting about humility and consequence, about how all that is noble begins in the ordinary labor of the hands. To lead is to serve; to serve is to till; and to till, in the end, is to pray.
