Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

Of course, it might refer to the patricians acceding to the sentence of exile.

… more proudlier

Yet all is not well with Coriolanus, either. He is still Coriolanus and can no more bend to the Volscians, now that he is leading them, than he could ever bend to the Romans. The Volscian officers are uneasy and even Tullus Aufidius is unhappy, saying:

He bears himself more proudlier,
Even to my person, than I thought he would
When first I did embrace him; yet his nature
In that's no changeling. ..

—Act IV, scene vii, lines 8-11

And yet he must be used, for he is conquering Rome without even having to fight. Aufidius says:

All places yield to him ere he sits down,
And the nobility of Rome are his;
The senators and patricians love him too.

—Act IV, scene vii, lines 28-30

Apparently, even though the patricians of Rome have agreed to resist, there remain some who cling more tightly to party than to country. And even those who are intending to resist can do so with only half a heart.

And yet can the patricians honestly think that the Volscians are willing to serve as nothing more than a bunch of errand boys for them, to help them back to power out of love and kindness? The outside power, brought in to help in an internal fight, stays (all history shows) to help itself at the expense of all. And Aufidius says, at the end of the scene, apostrophizing the absent Coriolanus (to whom he refers by the familiar first name as though the man is someone he can now consider a tool or servant):

When, Caius, Rome is thine,
Thou art poor'st of all; then shortly art thou mine

—Act IV, scene vii, lines 56-57

The patricians who decide to resist Coriolanus may be moved by abstract love of country, but they may also be moved by a realization of the danger of accepting foreign help under any circumstances. This is something the Greeks never learned (and few nations since).

… one poor grain or two …

Soon Rome knows the worst. It is Coriolanus' vengeful desire to burn it to the ground. Surrender will not satisfy him; only destruction will. (This is purely psychotic unless the patricians had specifically deserted Coriolanus in the scene I postulate to be missing.)

Cominius, the ex-consul, and Coriolanus' old general, had gone to plead and had been met coldly. Cominius had reminded Coriolanus of his friends in the city and reports that:

His answer to me was,
He could not stay to pick them in a pile
Of noisome musty chaff. He said 'twas folly,
For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt
And still to nose th'offense.

 

—Act V, scene i, lines 24-28

Even at best, with all possible motive, Coriolanus seems to have skirted the edge of madness here, for as Menenius points out:

For one poor grain or two!
I am one of those; his mother, wife, his child,

 

—Act V, scene i, lines 28-29

There seems little hope for penetrating the red veil of madness that has closed over Coriolanus' vengeful mind. Cominius says:

… all hope is vain
Unless his noble mother and his wife,
Who (as I hear) mean to solicit him
For mercy to his country.

 

—Act V, scene i, lines 70-74 

Wife, mother, child…

 Even this faint possibility seems to wither. Menenius is urged to try his luck with Coriolanus, but he is thrust scornfully away and Coriolanus denies that anyone, even his dearest, can sway him. He says to Menenius:

Wife, mother, child, I know not.
My affairs Are servanted to others.

 

—Act V, scene ii, lines 83-84

Has Coriolanus the strength to turn against his own mother? Perhaps, but only because he has a substitute. He remains the little boy who must have parental approval. Having brutally turned away Menenius, he turns to Aufidius and seeks approval with what might almost be a simper:

This man, Aufidius,
Was my beloved in Rome; yet thou behold'st.

 

—Act V, scene ii, lines 93-94

Aufidius knows his man. Gravely, he gives him what he wants and tells him he is a good boy:

You keep a constant temper.

 

—Act V, scene ii, line 95 

 

… I'll speak a little

But now the women come: his wife, his mother, the fair Valeria. His young son is also there.

Coriolanus kneels to his mother, but holds firm, saying:

Do not bid me
Dismiss my soldiers, or capitulate
Again with Rome's mechanics.
Tell me not Wherein I seem unnatural.
Desire not T'allay my rages and revenges with
Your colder reasons.

 

—Act V, scene iii, lines 81-86

He is determined to place his own grievances above Rome and wishes to cancel his mother's arguments even before she makes them.

But now Volumnia, in a speech of noble eloquence, shows that she places Rome before him and herself. Too late she tries to teach him that life is not a matter of blows and rages alone; that there are softer and nobler virtues:

Think'st thou it honorable for a noble man
Still [always] to remember wrongs?

 

—Act V, scene iii, lines 154-55

And when Coriolanus remains obdurate, she rises to return to Rome to die and then uses the one remaining weapon at her disposal, and the most terrible of alclass="underline"

Come, let us go.
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioles, and his child
Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch.
I am hushed until our city be a-fire,
And then I'll speak a little.

 

—Act V, scene iii, lines 177-82

With a terrible understatement, she makes it clear that when the city is burning, she will call down a dying mother's curse upon her son.

O my mother, mother…

And before this Coriolanus cannot stand. He collapses utterly and cries out:

O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son-believe it, O, believe it!-
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him.

—Act V, scene iii, lines 185-89

He turns away; he will not fight further against Rome; and he asks Au-fidius to make peace. Aufidius is willing to do so. With Coriolanus not in the fight, Rome will be difficult to take. It would be better to make the peace, use the results against Coriolanus, and perhaps fight Rome another time when Coriolanus is not present either to help or to hinder. So much we can assume. Aufidius actually says, in an aside, that he is glad at this development since it will help him ruin Coriolanus.

… made for Alexander

In Rome Menenius is gloomy. He tells an anxious Sicinius that he doesn't think Volumnia will prevail; after all, he himself did not. He describes Coriolanus in the most forbidding terms as nothing but a war machine:

He sits in his state
as a thing made for Alexander.

—Act V, scene iv, lines 22-23

He is, in other words, as immobile, as aloof, as untouched by humanity as a statue of Alexander the Great. This is an anachronism, for Alexander lived nearly a century and a half after Coriolanus and died in 323 b.c.