2 - The Roman agrarian laws and Machiavelli's modi privati

Summary

Alone among Shakespeare's plays, Coriolanus opens with a scene of mob violence. A throng of Roman plebeians comes on stage brandishing “staves, clubs, and other weapons,” and resolves to carry out a murder:

first cit. First, you know Caius Martius is chief enemy to the people. all. We know't, we know't.

first cit.

Let us kill him, and we'll have corn at our own price. Is't a verdict?

first cit. No more talking on't; let it be done. Away, away!

(1.1.6–11)

When a second citizen attempts to intervene, calling out “One word, good citizens,” the mob's leader turns on him:

first cit. We are accounted poor citizens, the patricians good. What authority surfeits on would relieve us. If they would yield us but the superfluity while it were wholesome, we might guess they relieved us humanely; but they think we are too dear: the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularise their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let us revenge this with our pikes, ere we become rakes. For the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.

(1.1.14–24)

At issue is the corn shortage of 492 bce, a state of affairs precipitated by the secession of the plebs in the previous year (during which fields could not be cultivated).