The Story of Coriolanus

At a Glance

• Central figures: Gaius Marcius, called Coriolanus after his capture of the Volscian city of Corioli; his mother Volumnia; his wife Virgilia; and Attius Tullus, king of the Volsci.
• Setting: Rome and the surrounding territory of Latium in the early years of the Republic, roughly 490 BCE, as recorded by Livy and later by Plutarch.
• The turn: Banished from Rome by the tribunes of the plebs, Coriolanus allies himself with the Volsci and marches an army against his own city.
• The outcome: Volumnia and Virgilia go out from the gates to meet him; Coriolanus withdraws the army, sparing Rome but sealing his own destruction among the Volsci.
• The legacy: A temple to Fortuna Muliebris - Women’s Fortune - was built on the Via Latina at the spot where the women turned Coriolanus back, and it stood for centuries as a monument to the intervention that saved the city.

The grain was running out. Rome’s stores had thinned through a hard year, and when a shipment of Sicilian wheat finally arrived at the port of Ostia, the Senate debated how to distribute it. Most senators favored selling it cheaply to the people. Gaius Marcius stood and said otherwise. He said the plebs had extorted their tribunes from the patricians during the secession to the Sacred Mount, and that giving them cheap grain now would only reward further extortion. Let them feel hunger, he argued, until they gave up the tribunate.

He had earned the right to be heard. He had earned it at Corioli.

The Walls of Corioli

The Volsci were Rome’s nearest and most persistent enemy in those years, and their stronghold at Corioli sat close enough to Roman territory that its smoke could be seen from the hills on a clear day. When the consul Cominius led the legions against it, the siege dragged and the defenders made a sortie that drove the Roman line back from the gates. Gaius Marcius rallied a handful of men and charged through the open gate into the city itself. The gate closed behind them. They were inside, outnumbered, fighting in the streets while the main army stood outside the walls unable to help.

He fought until the Volscians broke. Someone opened the gate from within - Marcius himself, or one of the men with him, depending on the account - and the legions poured in. Corioli fell. Cominius offered Marcius a tenth of the spoils: horses, captives, silver. Marcius refused everything except a single Volscian prisoner whom he knew as a friend and wished to see freed.

The army gave him the name Coriolanus. He wore it the rest of his life, though it would come to mean something different than glory.

The Tribunes and the Trial

Back in Rome, Coriolanus’s contempt for the plebs was not a private opinion. He spoke it in the Senate. He spoke it in the open. When the tribunes Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus accused him of tyrannical ambition - of wanting to strip the people of their lawful protections - he answered with more contempt, not less. He called the tribunate a disease. He called the grain dole a bribe.

The tribunes summoned him to trial before the people’s assembly. The patricians urged him to moderate his language. He would not. The charge was formally one of seeking kingship - adfectatio regni - though the real offense was his open hostility to the plebeian order. The assembly voted. He was condemned and banished.

Coriolanus walked out of Rome through the Esquiline Gate without looking back. Or so the later histories report, though Livy allows that no one could say for certain what was in his face.

The House of Attius Tullus

He went to Antium, the chief city of the Volsci - the very people he had beaten at Corioli. He found the house of Attius Tullus, their most powerful leader, and sat down at the hearth without being invited. When Tullus’s servants did not recognize him, he waited. When Tullus came in and demanded to know who he was, Coriolanus pulled back his cloak and gave his name.

He said he had nothing left but his name, and that Rome had taken even the honor attached to it. He offered his knowledge of Roman military dispositions, Roman politics, Roman weaknesses. He offered his sword. If Tullus wanted revenge for Corioli, Coriolanus would give it to him.

Tullus clasped his hand and raised him from the hearth. They began planning the campaign that same night.

The March on Rome

The Volscian army moved through Latium methodically, burning the farms of the plebeians and leaving patrician estates untouched - a deliberate provocation designed to split the city against itself. Colony after colony fell or surrendered. Coriolanus knew the Roman defensive positions, knew the roads, knew the garrison strengths. He had fought on every one of these fields before, only facing the other direction.

Rome sent ambassadors. They came back empty-handed. The Senate sent priests in their ceremonial robes. Coriolanus refused them too. He was camped within five miles of the city, at the Cluilian Ditch, and the smoke of Volscian campfires drifted over the walls at night. Panic spread through the streets. The tribunes who had banished him found no comfort in their authority now.

Volumnia at the Cluilian Ditch

What the ambassadors and the priests could not do, the Senate asked the women to attempt. Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother, went out from the city with Virgilia his wife, their two small sons, and a procession of Roman matrons. They walked the Via Latina toward the Volscian camp.

Coriolanus saw them coming. He had refused senators and pontifices. He had turned away men he had served with in the field. But he could not refuse his mother. Livy records that he went forward to embrace her and she stopped him.

Before I accept your greeting, tell me whether I have come to a son or to an enemy. Am I your mother, or a captive in your camp?

She told him what he already knew. That he could not take Rome without killing her. That no Roman son whose mother still lived would burn the city where she kept her household gods and tended the flame of her hearth. She asked him to consider what it meant that Rome’s last defense was a mother’s body placed between her son and the gates.

Coriolanus stood silent for a long time. Then he said - and Livy keeps the line - Mother, you have saved Rome but destroyed your son. He ordered the Volscian army to withdraw.

The Temple on the Via Latina

The army turned south. What happened next depends on the source. Livy says Coriolanus lived out his years in exile among the Volsci, growing old and bitter. Plutarch says the Volsci killed him - that Tullus, shamed by the retreat, accused him of betrayal and had him stoned to death in a public assembly. Some accounts say he was stabbed. The manner matters less than the certainty: he did not see Rome again.

Rome built a temple to Fortuna Muliebris - Women’s Fortune - on the spot along the Via Latina where Volumnia and the matrons had stopped. It stood about four miles from the city. The dedication was reserved for women who had been married only once, the univirae, and it was they who maintained the rites. The statue inside the temple was said to have spoken twice at its consecration, though what it said was disputed even in antiquity.

Coriolanus’s house on the Palatine was pulled down. The site was left empty. The Romans did not build over the homes of condemned men. The bare ground was its own kind of monument - not to his valor at Corioli, and not to his treachery at the Cluilian Ditch, but to both at once, held together in the silence that the res publica preferred to explanation.