George 'Cincinnatus' Washington

Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment: Images of Power in Early America, (Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1984).

The crucial enactment of this virtue and the key to Washington's stature among his contemporaries was his willingness to surrender power. Americans of the Enlighten- ment, Wills argues, needed a special kind of hero. They were trying to govern them- selves by the light of their own reason, and they needed evidence that they could succeed. Washington's accomplishments?combined with his carefully dramatized re- spect for republicanism?as army commander, constitution-maker, and chief executive made him not a divine emperor but a republican hero who typified in a more nearly perfect way the virtue that he and his fellow citizens shared. What could better link Washington with the people than his readiness to rejoin them as a private citizen? What could make him more worthy to hold power than his conspicuous refusal to prolong or abuse it? What could more fully vindicate self-government than being governed by a Washington? [review by Charles Royster, in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93: 3 (1985), 345]

Talking of which, here's a bit from Marianne Moore's 1932 poem, 'The Hero':

Cincinnatus was; Regulus; and some of our fellow
men have been, though

devout, like Pilgrim having to go slow
to find his roll; tired but hopeful
hope not being hope
until all ground for hope has
vanished; and lenient, looking
upon a fellow creature's error with the
feelings of a mother-a
woman or a cat. The decorous frock-coated Negro
by the grotto

answers the fearless sightseeing hobo
who asks the man she's with, what's this,
what's that, where's Martha
buried, "Gen-ral Washington
there; his lady, here"; speaking
as if in a play-not seeing her; with a
sense of human dignity
and reverence for mystery, standing like the shadow of the willow.

Moses would not be grandson to Pharaoh.
It is not what I eat that is
my natural meat,
the hero says. He's not out
seeing a sight but the rock
crystal thing to see-the startling El Greco
brimming with inner light-that
covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know
as the hero.