Politicians v the people: what our leaders could learn from Coriolanus

Shakespeare plucked an obscure Roman general from Plutarch and made him a principled but uncompromising hero. As the RSC brings the play back, its brutal statement on class divide and conviction politics has never hit harder

The Romans liked to commemorate their military victories with a showy gesture. Why just win a battle if you could also perform that victory with a triumphal procession, a few days of gladiatorial games, or a brand new name? The emperor Claudius – after he added Britain to the Roman Empire – was voted an additional title by his obedient Senate. He didn’t use it, according to the historian Cassius Dio. He preferred to pass it on to his son, who was thenceforth known as Britannicus. Nominative acquisition obviously ran in the family, because Claudius’s brother had been named Germanicus, after an earlier generation of family victories.

The more obscure figure of Gaius (or Caius or Cnaeus) Marcius is usually known to us by his toponym: Coriolanus. He lived (perhaps – his life is not well-attested) at the start of the fifth century BCE and acquired his name after acts of incredible bravery in the Roman attack on the Volscian city of Corioli. His story – a man of military prowess and political principle whose refusal to compromise entails his eventual downfall – was interesting enough to capture the attention of the Roman historian Livy, the Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the biographer Plutarch.

But Coriolanus is best known to modern audiences as the flawed hero of the eponymous play, which forms the potent conclusion to Angus Jackson’s Rome season for the Royal Shakespeare Company. What made Shakespeare choose the story of this relatively obscure Roman general from Plutarch’s book of Parallel Lives? Plutarch wrote biography for moral, didactic purposes, and paired the biographies of Roman and Greek figures to further illuminate both. So Alexander the Great was matched with Julius Caesar, but only the latter caught Shakespeare’s eye. Plutarch had been translated from Greek into French by Jacques Amyot, and then from French into English by Thomas North, and it was this version that Shakespeare was using: a translation of a translation.

And Plutarch wasn’t completely reliable. He lived almost 600 years after Coriolanus, and was using other histories that were themselves 100 years old. He was also writing about a foreign country. Scholars have speculated that the reason Shakespeare was more drawn to the stories of Romans than Greeks is because Plutarch was writing for a Greek audience. He included more detail in the biographies of the Romans because their society was less familiar to his readers.

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Certainly the detail gives the story a real sense of drama: Plutarch tells us that Gaius Marcius (not yet Coriolanus) was so brave in one early battle that he was given an oak wreath to wear. This, Plutarch says, is bestowed by law on a man who saves another citizen’s life in conflict. But why oak leaves? Plutarch goes on to explain that it was either in honour of the Arcadians (who had once been described by an oracle as “acorn-eaters”); or it was because there were always oak trees to be found nearby; or because the oak tree was sacred to Jupiter. In other words, Plutarch has an answer for the anthropologists, the rationalists and the god-fearing.

In common with most ancient biographers and historians, Plutarch’s historical methodology may look a bit vague to us. But Shakespeare didn’t particularly need accuracy to create drama. He needed a setting and strong characters, and Coriolanus’s story resonates with them: the ambitious young soldier, the articulate widowed mother, the old senator with a nice line in homely allegory.

It’s intriguing to see what Shakespeare took from Plutarch and what he chose to omit. The early years of Coriolanus are jettisoned: the play jumps straight into the action. There is famine, and the plebs blame Caius Marcius for keeping the price of corn too high. “You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?” is the third line of the play. The conflict that will animate the action – between the principled, inflexible Coriolanus and the increasingly angry citizens – is immediate.

This famine does appear in Plutarch’s biography, but it doesn’t receive so much prominence. The citizens have other reasons for their discontent: a plague that has struck the nearby town of Velitrae, meaning that they may be sent there to repopulate it, and the issue of debt relief. But which is more compelling: someone who is starving and angry about it, or someone who is starving, and might have to move to Velitrae, and would also like their debts forgiven?

One striking feature of the play is how closely the speeches are modelled on the versions we can read in our ancient sources. Menenius Agrippa pleads with his fellow citizens to learn to appreciate the role the patrician class plays in society. He tells them a hoary old fable about the limbs of the body going into revolt about the belly, because it takes all the nourishment but does nothing useful. Not fair, he explains: the belly receives all the nutrition and sends it to the right places. This speech appears in Livy, Dionysius and Plutarch. Obviously Shakespeare was more of a fan of it than Livy, who snarkily describes it as “prisco … horrido” – primitive and rough.

Coriolanus lived in a time of remarkable political evolution: Rome had just become a republic. Instead of a king, the city now had two consuls – each man elected for the year – both of whom had the capacity to veto the other’s decisions. The power of no always trumped the power of yes. But these powerful roles were limited to those of patrician class, who were allowed to stand for election. Plebeian citizens had no such opportunity, and were only starting to make themselves heard through the tribunes, who stood up for plebeian interests but had less potestas – power – than the consuls.

Coriolanus is a play that speaks to our contemporary politics better than most, particularly with its emphasis on a class divide that has ossified into social immobility. In 450BCE, 43 years after the events of the play, the Romans passed a law forbidding intermarriage between the patrician and plebeian classes. It is interesting to note two features of this law: first, intermarriage must have happened occasionally before 450 or there would have been little reason to ban it. And second, social division was solidifying over time, rather than the other way round. Not all movement is progress.

As for Coriolanus himself, he is a compelling figure: a man whose courage is never in question and whose principles are the very foundation of his existence. It’s a stark contrast with modern politicians who are often criticised for altering their views depending on the current political climate. When asked, focus groups routinely say they want politicians who listen to their concerns. The sense that she is disconnected from ordinary people has dogged Theresa May not least in times of crisis. Her inability to talk to people was compared unfavourably with the Queen after the fire at Grenfell Tower.

But we are also profoundly intolerant of politicians who change their minds (an occasional consequence of listening). May was punished for reversing her position on an early election, having repeatedly stated that she would not go to the polls. Is there something to be said, then, for a politician who sticks to principles regardless of the pain it might cause him? Conviction politicians have a huge impact today, partly because they can get their message out via social media, and partly because any shift in position is now seized upon as the worst kind of hypocrisy. But it is a risky strategy for the politician: Livy finds one early source who believed Coriolanus lived into ripe old age, but it’s not a view shared by any other historian.