had caused his wife to write. With him are other men of senatorial rank. To them all, Lucrece tells the story, and while they stand there horrified, she draws her knife and kills herself.
For a moment, all stand transfixed. Lucretius, her father, throws himself in sorrow on her body:
And from the purple fountain Brutus drew
The murd'rous knife...
- lines 1734-35
This is the first mention of Lucius Junius Brutus, an aristocrat who had escaped the deadly attentions of King Tarquin by pretending to be a moron and therefore harmless. ("Brutus" means "stupid," and this name was, supposedly, given to him because of his successful play acting. However, the truth may be the reverse. It may have been known that one of the destroyers of the Tarquinian kingdom was named Brutus and for lack of other hard details after the Gallic sack in 390 b.c., the meaning of the name was allowed to inspire the tale of his pretending to be a moron.)
Brutus had good reason to play it safe in any way he could, for according to the legend, his father and older brother had been among those executed by Tarquin-something which did not cause him to love the king either.
Now, seeing the shock, horror, and hatred sweeping the spectators, Brutus feels that he will be able to head a popular movement against the kingdom. He no longer needs his pretense of stupidity:
Brutus, who pluck'd the knife from Lucrece' side,
Seeing such emulation in their woe,
Began to clothe his wit in state and pride,
Burying in Lucrece' wound his folly's show.
- lines 1807-10
Brutus rouses the crowd and the poem ends with a final (and 265th) verse:
They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence,
To show her bleeding body thorough Rome,
And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence;
Which being done with speedy diligence,
The Romans plausibly [with applause] did give consent
To Tarquin's everlasting banishment.
- lines 1850-55
Thus did the Roman kingdom come to an end. In its place was established the Roman Republic, which five centuries later was to rule all the Mediterranean world.
Part II. Roman 10. The Tragedy of Coriolanus
Oe of the most popular of the ancient historians was Plutarch, a Greek who was born in Chaeronea, a town about sixty miles northwest of Athens, in a.d. 46. In his time, Greece had long passed the days of its military splendor and was utterly dominated by Rome, then at the very height of its empire.
Anxious to remind the Romans (and Greeks too) of what the Greeks had once been, Plutarch wrote a series of short biographies about a.d. 100 in which he dealt with men in pairs, one Greek and one Roman, the two being compared and contrasted. Thus, Theseus (see page I-18), the legendary unifier of the Attic peninsula under Athens, was paired with Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. For this reason, the book is commonly called The Parallel Lives. Plutarch's style is so pleasing that his book, with its gossipy stories about great historical figures, has remained popular ever since.
It was put into English in 1579 (from a French version) by Sir Thomas North, who did it so well that his book turned out to be one of the prose masterpieces of the Elizabethan Age. Shakespeare read it and used it as the basis for three of his plays. He paid the translation the ultimate compliment of scarcely changing its words in some cases. They made almost perfect blank verse as they stood.
Shakespeare wrote Coriolanus about 1608 and it was the last of his three Plutarchian plays. Its subject matter was, however, the earliest in time, so I am placing it first.
The action opens in 494 b.c. (according to legend), only fifteen years after the rape of Lucrece, the expulsion of the Tarquins, and the establishment of the Republic by Brutus (see page I-211). The events described in the play are therefore of extremely dubious value historically, for they take place a century before the destruction of the Roman annals by the Gallic invaders (see page I-204).
Nevertheless, with Plutarch's guidance, Shakespeare can draw upon a complete and interesting story, though perhaps one that is too romantic to sound completely true.
... to die than to famish
Coriolanus opens in the streets of Rome, with citizens hurrying onstage in a fever of agitation, carrying weapons. Some crisis is taking place and the men are desperate. Their leader is called "First Citizen" in the play and he calls out to them: