https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cincinnatus/

"You have often heard him compared to Cincinnatus," the French traveller Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville wrote after visiting George Washington at Mount Vernon in 1788. "The comparison is doubtless just. The celebrated General is nothing more at present than a good farmer, constantly occupied in the care of his farm and the improvement of cultivation."1

Brissot's classically-educated readers would have been familiar with the story of the Roman general Cincinnatus from the Roman historian Livy, or from contemporary works like Charles Rollin's popular history of Rome, published in 1750. According to the story, powerful enemies of Rome, the Aequians, were threatening an invasion of the city. The Roman Senate, finding the current consul unprepared to meet the crisis, voted unanimously to confer the extraordinary powers of dictatorship on their most distinguished former general, L. Quinctius Cincinnatus.