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. Continue reading...
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