Coriola'nus, CAIUS or CNÆUS MARCIUS

Coriola'nus, CAIUS or CNÆUS MARCIUS, a Roman patrician, surnamed Coriolanus from his heroism at the capture of the Volscian town of Corioli (493 B.C.). Of a proud and haughty spirit, he was strongly opposed to the plebeians, who refused to elect him when a candidate for the consulship. After this, during a time of famine, he argued in the senate against a gratuitous distribution of the corn which had arrived from Sicily, unless the plebeians should give up their tribunes, but lately instituted. For this he was impeached, and banished. He took refuge among the Volscians, whom he aided in their war with the Romans. His victories at the head of his Volscian troops alarmed the Romans, who, on his approach to their city, sent a variety of deputation to plead with him. He was deaf to every entreaty. At last, the noblest matrons of Rome, headed by his old mother Veturia, and his wife Volumnia, leading her two children, came to his tent. (Shakespeare follows Plutarch in calling the mother Volumnia, while the wife is Virginia.) Their tears cooled his fierce desire to be revenged on those who had dishonoured him, and he led back the Volsci to their own territories. Shakespeare's Coriolanus is a stately and impressive drama, its hero a magnificent creative realisation of the haughty but noble aristocrat of Plutarch's story.