Focus on Shakespeare's Rome: Coriolanus, 1.9.59-72

COMINIUS: Too modest are you,

More cruel to your good report than grateful

To us that give you truly. By your patience,

If ’gainst yourself you be incensed, we’ll put you,

Like one that means his proper harm, in manacles,

Then reason safely with you. Therefore be it known,

As to us to all the world, that Caius Martius

Wears this war’s garland, in token of the which

My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him,

With all his trim belonging. And from this time,

For what he did before Corioles, call him,

With all th’ applause and clamor of the host,

Martius Caius Coriolanus! Bear

Th’ addition nobly ever!

Coriolanus, 1.9.59-72 , Folger Shakespeare Library

This quote delivers to us the true dimension of a legendary figure, of Rome’s perhaps fiercest warrior. As chief warrior of Rome’s army, he has fought nasty and cruel battles. Since a very young age, fighting in every battlefield Caius Martius' has “earned” several wounds on his body as evidence that describe eloquently his honorable behavior. This crucial moment gives him an earned rebirth among laureate soldiers since he has defeated the city of Corioles. His goal, pursued through martial service has been finally fulfilled while his aspirations for divinity perhaps confirmed. Becomes irrefutable at this point that no man can compare to him concerning expertise and bravery in battle. Therefore the ‘war’s garland’ is to him, a deserved rebirth. While the hereditary nobility in Rome held not necessarily any monopoly of skill and prowess in war, because of his lineage, his mind and soul has been shaped into a classical hero archetype. Coming up to the character’s entropic line, Coriolanus at length will release his anger and this fact will force him to submit to his civic and familial bonds. Failing to fulfil the city’s custom showing his wounds to the people, he will be in fact be condemned for treason rejecting the modus operandi of the peoples’ tribunes, a sort of hybris in the tragic sense.

This moment gives the protagonist the confirmation he seeks from a very young age, the reciprocal bonds of fellowship and recognition from his peers. His tempered warlike character is immutable, and the new name confirms the moral and martial agency he has earned indeed. His narcissistic nature nevertheless connotes the inevitable fall from grace that will reshape him back to his man’s stature. While this moment seems to sublimate through both, his own merits and the humbling responsibilities he owes as a soldier to the members of his household and by extension the citizens of Rome. Paradoxically enough within the conception of Roman civiltas Coriolanus seems to strenuously strive to ‘author himself’ by doing so he denies his ties to Roman community and Roman posterity conception. Doing everything in his power to earn his current reputation, as the one who defeated Corioles’ forces, as a soldier he represented Romanitas values but he is not capable to accept his contingent relation to history and communitas. Coriolanus has reached at a man’s state, by serving his community simultaneously approaching the members of society who are forced to depend on others, he is not able to recognized this fact. The moral dimension of the ‘polis’ metabolized from the Hellenistic heritage rebuilt in the romanitas connotation of the play clashes its great anatomy as a political corpus and power has a significant connotation in this play that its protagonist fails to recognize when its most necessary.