This is a follow-up to my post from last November All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans, in which I wrote about Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra. I had intended to write about Coriolanus too, but I ran out of time and the post was already rather long.

Having the defeated the Volsces in battle and captured their city Corioles, Caius Martius Coriolanus is now expected to become consul. He has the support of the Senate and patricians but he also needs the people’s approval, something that would normally be forthcoming for a victorious military leader who had enriched the city with the spoils of war. It was usual for a soldier who sought the consulship to appear before the populace, boast of his brave actions in combat, and display the wounds he had sustained in Rome’s service. Coriolanus can’t bring himself to do it. He holds the people in contempt, having in the first scene called them “dissentious rogues, | That rubbing the poor itch of your opinion | Make yourself scabs” (I.i.162–4) and “curs” (I.i.166). To appear before them as a suppliant, begging for their “voices” would be unthinkably demeaning.

When Coriolanus manages to get the required approval by demanding rather than entreating, and without showing any wounds, the tribunes of the people, Junius Brutus and Sicinius Velutus, incite the citizens to a pitch of fury, to the point where they not only revoke their consent but demand that Coriolanus be thrown to his death from the Tarpeian Rock. To have any hope of rectifying the situation, Coriolanus will have to apoligize for his haughty rigidity. His mother, Volumnia, has the argument that might sway him:

But when extremities speak, I have heard you say,
Honour and policy, like unsevered friends,
I’th’war do grow together. Grant that, and tell me
In peace what each of them by th’other lose
That they combine not there. (III.ii.41–5)

If there’s nothing dishonourable about deceiving the enemy during wartime, why should he think that honour prevents him from dissembling his true intentions and feelings where the people are concerned? Menenius approves of this line of argument, which Volumnia resumes:

If it be honour in your wars to seem
The same you are not, which for your best ends
You adopt your policy, how is it less or worse
That it shall hold companionship in peace
With honour as in war, since that to both
It stands in like request? (III.ii.46–51)

To deceive the people, she urges

… no more dishonours you at all
Than to take in a town with gentle words,
Which else would put you to your fortune and
The hazard of much blood. (III.ii.58–61)

What Volumnia doesn’t say is that this argument implies that her son owes no greater duty of truthfulness to his plebeian countrymen in peacetime than to an enemy in war. Honour is compatible with “policy” because there’s no duty to deal fairly with an enemy. Of course, the application of this principle to Coriolanus’s situation is questionable: officially, there is no state of war between the Roman patricians and the ordinary citizens, but Volumnia understands that Coriolanus views the plebeians as an enemy. In the previous scene, he has told Menenius and Cominius:

I would they were barbarians, as they are,
Though in Rome littered; not Romans, as they are not,
Though calved i’th’porch o’the’Capitol. (III.i.237–9)

Later in the play, when Volumnia again has to persuade her stubborn son to swerve from the course he is resolved on, she again invokes honour. Having been permanently banished from the city, Coriolanus has sought out his old sworn enemy, Tullus Aufidius, the Volscian general, and undertaken to lead an attack on Rome. He will deliver his former home city to the Volsces. The pleas of his former comrades, his friend and adviser Menenius, his wife and even the prospect that his young son will be slaughtered, completely fail to move him. Volumnia has one argument left.

If it were so that our request did tend
To save the Romans, thereby to destroy
The Volsces whom you serve, you might condemn us
As poisonous of your honour. No, our suit
Is that you reconcile them, while the Volsces
May say, “This mercy we have showed”, the Romans
“This we received”, and each in either side
Give the all-hail to thee and cry “Be blest
For making up this peace!” (V.iii.132–40)

On the other hand, if he goes ahead as planned and sacks his own city, his name will be “To th’ensuing age abhorred” (V.iii.148). Here, Volumnia shows that she understands what “honour” means to her son better than she had seemed to do in the earlier scene. Then, she had affected to believe that his qualms had to do with acting deceptively — dishonestly. In fact, Coriolanus’s concerns about his honour had more to do with having to petition the despised plebeians for something that it was in their power to withhold.

Coriolanus’s idea of honour is something that Volumnia herself has instilled in him.

When yet he was yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings’ entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person — that if renown made it not stir — was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned his brows bound with oak. (I.iii.5–14)

Martius (who will be given the cognomen “Coriolanus” following his capture of the city Corioles) is forthright, disdaining to hide his contempt for the common people. In the play’s first scene, he tells them:

      Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil. He that depends
Upon your favours swims with fins of lead
And hews down oaks with rushes. Hang ye! Trust ye? (I.i.174–9)

Immediately afterwards he says to Menenius:

Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves as high
As I could pick my lance. (I.i.195–8)

Menenius doesn’t seem to dissent from his younger friend’s opinion of the citizenry but he is more dipolmatic and conciliatory, at least until Rome is threatened by Coriolanus’s vengeful return, when he taunts the tribunes for their stupidity in depriving the city of its former champion. When, at the beginning of the play, the people are about to revolt because of food shortages, he tells them a fable of the body politic, in which all nourishment comes from the senators, as the “belly” of the state:

The senators of Rome are this good belly,
And you the mutinous members. For examine
Their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly
Touching the weal o’th’common, you shall find
No public benefit which you receive
But it proceeds or comes from them to you,
And no way from yourselves. (I.i.146–52)

Clearly, the characterization of the senate as the city’s storehouse is self-serving on Menenius’s part, and not to be taken at face value. Equally clearly, though, ancient Rome did not have a capitalist economy, in which all value was the product of a proletariat. We’re not told exactly what the rebellious citizens work at but it seems unlikely that they are expecially productive. As similar crowd at the opening of Julius Cæsar is made up of service workers: a carpenter and a cobbler are the first to be questioned. After Martius’s banishment but before he threatens to return in vengeance, on of the tribunes, Sicinius Velutus, happily notes “Our tradesmen singing in their shops and going | About their functions friendly” (IV.vi.8–9).

It’s safe to say, then, that the source of Rome’s wealth lies neither in the deliberations of the senate nor in the labours of the tradespeople. Given the significance of “grain” (I.i.79) in the popular protests, we can assume that agriculture plays a large part. The other important element is predation. After the fall of Corioles the general, Cominius, offers Martius one tenth of the spoils “Before the common distribution” (I.ix.35). Martius declines to accept:

      I thank you general,
But cannot make my heart consent to take
A bribe to pay my sword. I do refuse it,
And stand upon my common part with those
That have beheld the doing. (I.ix.36–40)

Martius, it appears, is not driven by a desire to get rich, or richer. The ease with which he later goes over to Aufidius’s side suggests that neither is he motivated by love of his city. His main aim is to achieve glory, and it is his mother’s reminder that to destroy his own city can only dishonour his name that finally persuades him to break with Aufidius. That, rather than the life of his son, his wife or his mother herself.

The deal that he negotiates presumably costs Rome dear and favours the Volsces. However, he has acted without the approval of the Volscian senate and (though their leaders seem happy enough with the outcome) that makes it easy for Aufidius finally to put paid to his old enemy. Though the title of the play is The Tragedy of Coriolanus, Martius’s death feels less like a tragic ending than a damage limitation exercise, the tidying away of someone who has always been an awkward customer, except on the battlefield. Aufidius’s oration over the body has a notably muted air:

Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully,
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory. (V.vi.151–5)

This was not the noblest Roman of them all.

Martius’s attitude towards the common citizenry is abhorrent, but there is, by his own lights, a rationale to it. He believes that the office of tribune should be abolished, as it was established, in effect, under duress:

      In a rebellion,
When what’s not meet, but what must be, was law,
Then were they chosen. In a better hour
Let what is meet be said it must be meet,
And throw their power i’th’dust. (III.i.166–70)

For their part, the tribunes think that Coriolanus, having been elected one of the two consuls, intended to rule alone, becoming in effect a dictator. After his expulsion, Sicinius says he had been “affecting one sole throne | Without assistance (IV.vi.32–3). Menenius does not believe this.

The “Martian perspective” in my title for this post refers to Martius’s peculiar way of looking at things. “Martial” might have been a less misleading adjective, but I think it’s worth noting that the alternative form does indeed appear in the play, when Brutus refers to “The noble house o’th’Martians” (II.iii.237).

Edition: Penguin Classics paperback, 2005, 2015.