Livy, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Summary

In Book 7 of his great history of Rome, from her foundation to the time of Augustus, Titus Livius recounts, with a certain admixture of scepticism, the story of Marcus Curtius. In the year 362 bc, a chasm suddenly opened in the middle of the Forum. The soothsayers, when consulted, declared that only a ritual sacrifice of the thing ‘wherein the most puissance and greatnes of the people of Rome consisted’ could close the fissure and ‘make the state of Rome to remain sure forever’. Much discussion followed, but no one could determine what that precious thing might be. Then Marcus Curtius, described in Philemon Holland’s Elizabethan translation of Livy as ‘a right hardie knight and martiall yong gentleman’, ‘rebuked them therefore, because they doubted whether the Romanes had any earthly thing better than armour and valor’. Armed at all points, he mounted a horse ‘as richly trapped and set out as possible he could devise’, and – like Hotspur at Shrewsbury – ‘leapt into destruction’ (2 Henry IV, 1.3.33). The gulf closed.