Celtic’s Cincinnatus deserves his fairytale ending.

In the days of the Roman Republic, the one thing hated more than almost anything else was the idea of an absolute monarch. It was what the Republic had been explicitly set up to avoid. No one man was ever supposed to have authority over all the levers of the state.

The heads of the Roman Republic were called consuls and, even there, no one was allowed to rule alone. During elections, Rome did not elect one consul but two, precisely to ensure that power was shared. The consulship itself lasted only a year, and the same man could not simply stand again and again as if the office belonged to him. The system was designed to prevent power from settling permanently in one pair of hands.

There was only one exception to this rule, and it was both the Republic’s smartest move and, in time, its most awful curse. In a moment of national emergency, the civil government system could be suspended and all power placed in the hands of a single individual for the duration of that emergency.

They called that individual the dictator.

Rome had many dictators in its time. They were appointed by the Senate. They were granted absolute power by the Senate. The caveat was that they had to return that power to the Senate once the crisis had passed.

That was the theory anyway.

In truth, the dictator had such wide-ranging powers that he could easily have used them against the Senate itself, disbanded the institution and used military force to crush or subjugate any remaining resistance in the state. That is how trusted the dictator had to be. Rome was handing one man the keys to the whole machine and hoping he would give them back when the work was done.

There were men who used emergency power to enhance their own position. Sulla did it. Caesar did it. Pompey, although not technically a dictator, occupied the same dangerous political territory when the Republic started granting extraordinary commands to men too powerful for the old rules to contain.

By the time those men came around, Rome had already entered a very dangerous place. Men like that commanded private armies and vast wealth. If you were ambitious enough and ruthless enough to press your own claim, the safeguards of the state were insufficient to stop you. That is why, when a Sulla appeared, the Senate answered with a Marius. It is why they ended up in a place where the choices were either Caesar or Pompey, and they knew that either way, the old order was gone.

But Cincinnatus was not like those men.

When the Roman Republic called him out of retirement, he was an old man working on his farm. He was the epitome of the Republican order: steadfast, loyal, procedural, ruthless when necessary, but dedicated to the maintenance and security of the Republic itself.

Still, what Rome did was remarkable, and what he did was even more remarkable. They gave him absolute power to resolve an emergency. He achieved that goal in a matter of days. Then he gave the state back its authority instantly, without asking for a single thing in return, and went back to work on his farm.

He is the poster boy for political legitimacy, for loyalty to the system, for respect and adherence to the tenets of that system and the ideals that underpinned it. Even now, it is remarkable that any person could be loyal to an idea over the self. It is all the more incredible when you consider the men who came after him, and what they did when their own interests and the interests of the state began to diverge.

Cincinnatus did not even consider what was in his own interests.

He put the state first.

I always hoped that Neil Lennon would be our Cincinnatus. He stepped in twice, in emergency situations, but instead of walking away at the end of them, the board extended the dictatorship.

I never thought his career trajectory merited getting the Celtic job either time. I thought it was an arrogant appointment from a board of directors which believed itself to be possessed of some genius that the rest of the football world did not have.

No one else in football rated Lennon at this level, and for reasons passing understanding, they thought they knew better. Perhaps they still do.

My regard for Lennon the man is probably higher than anyone will give me credit for, but Lennon the manager gets no special treatment and has no special place in my heart. I believe that his elevation was the triumph of mediocrity, both his and the mediocrity of those who gave him the job.

He was a Cincinnatus on the surface level only.

The point about Cincinnatus is that he was not just some son of the Republic whose name they plucked out of a ledger out of desperation after burning through all the other options. He had been a great general. He had rendered tremendous service to the state. They were not taking a wild punt. They knew what his qualities were.

That is why O’Neill is a much more credible Cincinnatus than Lennon. We do not have to wonder whether O’Neill had the skill set. We already knew he did. Not only did he give great service to Celtic, but his managerial career shows that he had the experience. His name carried weight around the club. It had credibility in the stands. Without that credibility, it would never have worked.

What a lot of people do not know about Cincinnatus is that he served as dictator twice.

The first time is the great story historians love to tell, the one where he is the model of civic virtue and Republican restraint. The second is darker. In that case, the Senate was facing a political rival who had amassed wealth and individual power, and they used Cincinnatus as the weapon with which to crush him.

That is where the story changes.

In the first instance, the Roman Senate brought Cincinnatus in to defend the Republican ideal. In the second, they brought him in to defend themselves. That is where the parallel becomes truly dark, because if these people give O’Neill the chance to stay, and he accepts it, they will not be doing it because they have suddenly discovered wisdom or vision. They will be doing it because he gives them cover.

They will hold him up as a shield against their own critics.

They will use his name, his credibility and his enduring bond with the supporters to preserve their own authority. They will wrap themselves in his reputation and pretend that his presence proves the structure still works, when in reality his presence proves the opposite.

See, on the surface of it, Martin has also come back and held the dictatorship twice. But the appearance is deceptive. Martin did not save us from a crisis, depart, and then come back to save us from another crisis. Martin came back twice to save us from the same crisis, and that crisis is the people at the top of our club.

That crisis is ongoing in spite of our successful season, and I have lost patience with so many people who will not understand this. These people are a clear and present danger, with the emphasis on present, to the wellbeing of Celtic.

Martin has twice had to save us from the mess they made. The very fact that he came in the first time, stabilised a calamitous situation they had created, left with the ship in calm seas, and then had to come back to clean up yet another mess of their making, damns them as incompetents of the first rate.

That they then went on to deny him the help he needed in January, when the need was greatest, when his reputation hung in the balance and when there was one last chance to do right by the manager and save the season, is the grossest act of self-sabotage in our recent history. Whether by accident or design, it no longer makes a difference. This was won in spite of them, and if they use him now as a prop in a final effort to safeguard their own positions, it will be a disgrace without parallel.

They are the real danger. They are the source of the crisis, and hiring O’Neill will not fix that. In fact, it will confirm it. Not because he cannot do it. Not because he is not capable. But because he is the final evidence that they do not have any kind of vision for this club’s future. They cling to the past because it is all they have got.

My concern is that they will use O’Neill as a sticking plaster, and that he might let them do that because his first loyalty is to Celtic itself. He may well assume that everyone else at the club feels the same way.

The problem is that these people long ago ceased viewing Celtic as being separate from themselves. They are not Celtic.

They just think they are.

There is no man in the modern history of this club who has rendered greater service to Celtic. Not since Jock Stein have we had such a man at the helm. Everyone knows I had tremendous respect for Rodgers, and I think the way this club treated him was disgusting. But O’Neill is the true inheritor of Stein’s mantle. He is the true icon. He is the man who deserves a statue in the car park.

But O’Neill is not being drafted in to protect the republican system. He is being hired by men who have themselves become dictators; accountable to no one, answerable to no one, and willing to risk the reputations of others in order to preserve their own position.

That is why I hope he walks away.

For Martin O’Neill, this is the top of the mountain. It does not matter what he does from here on in; nothing is going to top this.

Nothing can.

Of course, he could stay another year. He could stay another two. He could even assemble another treble-winning team. But all that would do is confirm what we already know. There are no surprises there. There is no emotional peak like the one we have just gone through.

I have never known a title like this in my life. I have never known a title win that felt less certain and yet more earned.

When the rest of world football, or at least that part of it which cares, stumbles out of the Hearts pity party at four in the morning, reeling drunk, collapses into bed and wakes up in the cold light of day, it will eventually stop and consider what O’Neill has done here.

And when it does, it will know the truth.

Placed in the full context, this was the fairytale story they wanted. This was a greater miracle than a Hearts title win in these circumstances ever would have been.

There is no greater glory here. There is no larger point to prove. He is standing on the top of the mountain, and to get to the top of the next one means going down into the valley and starting the climb all over again.

Even if he wants to do it, even if he has the strength for it, even if he has the energy to make it to the top of that next mountain, what could be better than this?

Today, he stands atop the highest summit.

This is the myth made flesh. This is the legend given form. This season is his finest monument, the one for which we will forever be in his debt.

He has rendered the greatest service he can, and if we want to keep the fairy tale, this is where it should end.

It should end where they all end: with the fair maiden awakened by love’s first kiss. We do not need to see the tribulations of she and the handsome knight raising eight kids in a ramshackle hut in the middle of the enchanted forest.

We know what the climactic moment in the story was, and to preserve the myth it has to end on a mythic note.

Even to risk that feels wrong. A good editor might call anything else “narratively unsatisfying.”

More than that, if he’s being used to prop up a worthless regime, it would be obscene.

Cincinnatus is revered but it is the final act which ensures his immortality. They called him back from the farm, and he returned to the farm. Of all those who know his name and his legend, most don’t care which enemy he bested nor which crisis he resolved.

He was given power, and he gave it back.

That is why it is poetic. That is why it is beautiful.

That is why it endures.

That is the sort of ending this greatest of servants to Celtic deserves.

Choose The CelticBlog as a ‘Preferred Source’ on Google News for quick access to the news you value.