MENENIUS
The senate, Coriolanus, are well pleased
To make thee consul.
CORIOLANUS
I do owe them still
My life and services.
MENENIUS
It then remains
That you do speak to the people.
CORIOLANUS
I do beseech you,
Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked and entreat them,
For my wounds’ sake, to give their suffrage: please you
That I may pass this doing.
SICINIUS
Sir, the people
Must have their voices; neither will they bate
One jot of ceremony.
MENENIUS
Put them not to’t:
Pray you, go fit you to the custom and
Take to you, as your predecessors have,
Your honour with your form.
CORIOLANUS
It is a part
That I shall blush in acting, and might well
Be taken from the people.
BRUTUS
Mark you that?
CORIOLANUS
To brag unto them, thus I did, and thus;
Show them the unaching scars which I should hide,
As if I had received them for the hire
Of their breath only! (Act II, scene 2, 134–155)
Coriolanus finally decided to go through with the required ritual of baring his wounds in the Forum and asking the people for their support. But he seems to have hated himself for doing so, musing halfway through the ordeal:
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,
Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t:
What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,
The dust on antique time would lie unswept,
And mountainous error be too highly heapt
For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so,
Let the high office and the honour go
To one that would do thus. I am half through;
The one part suffer’d, the other will I do. (Act II, scene 3, 121–132)
He did indeed win the support of the people, and he withdrew from the Forum in expectation of his consulship. But the conniving tribunes, in Shakespeare’s telling, saw an opportunity to step forward and turn the people against Coriolanus by revealing his contempt for them. When the people subsequently switched sides and spurned Coriolanus as arrogant, he denounced popular rule as mere appeal to a rabble. His political enemies had him banished from Rome.
Whereupon Coriolanus himself switched sides. He joined his old battlefield enemy, Tullus Aufidius, the king of the Volsci, and led the Volscian army into battle against Rome, the unworthy city of his birth. Only the intervention of his mother at the eleventh hour, with the Volscian army on the verge of overrunning Rome, dissuaded Coriolanus from destroying the city he might have led as consul, had he only been willing to do what he was manifestly incapable of doing: appealing for the support of those he regarded as unworthy to judge him. Coriolanus instead brokered a peace between Rome and the Volsci. But the deal infuriated Aufidius, who was reveling in the prospect of his imminent conquest (though he was at best ambivalent about his reliance on Coriolanus for the chance). In the end, the bitter Aufidius induced a mob to set upon Coriolanus and kill him.
Plutarch remarks that “whereas other men found in glory the chief end of valour, he found the chief end of glory in his mother’s gladness”: Coriolanus saved Rome for mom’s sake. In Shakespeare’s telling, as Coriolanus saw his mother, wife, and son approaching camp, he reflects
My wife comes foremost; then the honour’d mould
Wherein this trunk was framed [Coriolanus’s mother], and in her hand
The grandchild to her blood. But, out, affection!
All bond and privilege of nature, break!
Let it be virtuous to be obstinate.
What is that curt’sy worth? or those doves’ eyes,
Which can make gods forsworn? I melt, and am not
Of stronger earth than others. My mother bows;
As if Olympus to a molehill should
In supplication nod: and my young boy
Hath an aspect of intercession, which
Great nature cries ‘Deny not.’ Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy: I’ll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand,
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin. (Act V, scene 3, 22–38)
Coriolanus’s resolve to “be obstinate” in the face of his family’s entreaties did not hold up, nor was he able to “stand” as “author of himself,” his heroic effort to do so notwithstanding. Perhaps there is a type of being that stands as “author of” itself, but a human who seeks to do so is a self-contradiction, desiring to be something a human is not. Had Coriolanus been able to withstand the entreaties of his family, had he proceeded to destroy Rome and his family along with it, he would still not have been “author of himself” insofar as he sought to make of himself something a human cannot be.
The heroism of Achilles and Lucretia is not tragic. Their willingness to face death is not a rebellion against their humanity but an embrace of it. They are each “great in their greatness” and completely human at one and the same time. Coriolanus is a tragic hero. He wanted to be something no human can be. The death he encountered as a result was no affirmation of his heroic heart or sense of his own greatness, but rather a rebuke to a sense of greatness seeking to extend itself beyond the human. Death has a way of reminding one of one’s humanity in the event one has forgotten it, and it was coming for Coriolanus whether or not he destroyed Rome. But for Rome, destruction or survival was a pretty close call. Deluded or undeluded, the heroic type can pose grave danger.
Alcibiades burst on the scene of fifth century BCE Athens like a supernova. He was a beautiful, brilliant, well-born young man, rumored to have been the lover of his teacher Socrates. Alcibiades figures prominently in two dialogues of Plato, one of which bears his name, both of which ostensibly treat the subject of love but also address his spectacular political ambition and the attempt of Socrates to place some checks on it for Alcibiades’s own good.
This Socrates sought to do by transforming the traditional erotic desire of an older Athenian man for a boy into the desire of the boy for the older man. The reversed attraction would then make the boy receptive to the advice of the older man—in the case of Alcibiades, to come to a better understanding of the world and himself before throwing himself headlong into politics.
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