SOURCE: “Coriolanus and the Myth of Juno and Mars,” in Mosaic, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 33-50.

[In the following essay, Simonds describes the figures of Coriolanus and Volumnia in Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus as personifications of the Roman gods Mars and Juno, respectively.]

Shakespeare's Coriolanus has usually been studied as a socio-political statement by the dramatist, as a psychological case history of a hero dominated by his mother, or as evidence of the playwright's attitudes toward Roman history, a subject of great general interest during the Renaissance. Although all these aspects of the tragedy are clearly important, I believe they mainly provide rich surface textures which mask an essential and thus far overlooked mythical substructure of the play. Recently John W. Velz has advanced what seems to be a mythological interpretation in an article attempting to demonstrate similarities between the character of Coriolanus and that of Virgil's warlike Turnus, a primitive type who must be overcome by Aeneas in order for Roman destiny to reach fulfillment.¹ However, Velz makes no effort to explain the equally primitive personality of Volumnia and her strange relationship with her son, an element of the Coriolanus story which does not have a counterpart in the Aeneid. In any case, the majority of scholars agree that Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation of Plutarch's “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus” is the major source of Shakespeare's tragedy, although the playwright's knowledge of Virgil—and indeed of Ovid, Apuleius and Livy as well—may also have influenced his composition of this Roman play.

Predominantly a moralist in the Lives, Plutarch used the legend of Coriolanus to prove that young Roman warriors need the discipline of a strong father in order to fulfill their true potential, a subject of no interest whatsoever to the Renaissance playwright. In his dramatic version of the myth, Shakespeare seems to have discovered and deliberately emphasized the archetypal elements which underlie Plutarch's exemplum. He thereby transfigures and universalizes this tragic story of a superb military leader who could not learn the civilized art of politics, was later exiled from the city he had served so well in wartime, and was ultimately abandoned by both his mother and Rome to a sacrificial death in the rival city of Corioles. I would emphasize, however, that when I speak of “archetypal elements,” I do not mean to suggest a Jungian theory of “collective unconscious” influences at work in the playwright, which would indicate a basically anti-historical point of view. The archetypes I want to examine are the classical models—gods and heroes—which were in the forefront of the consciousness of any schoolboy in Shakespeare's time.

Northrop Frye has argued that in the literary use of mythological subjects, “The allegorist [such as Plutarch] tends to try to drop the divine personality and concentrate on the event: the poet tends to see the event only as symbolic of the activity of the personality.”² Thus, by concentrating on the personalities in his staging of the Coriolanus story, Shakespeare reveals once more the true underlying deities and, as I will show, he refocuses our attention on the lasting significance of the ancient myth that concerns them. I believe that he is primarily concerned here with the uses which the Feminine Principle—as mother, city and Civitas—deliberately makes of masculine aggressiveness, which she herself arouses. He expresses this interest by portraying the leading characters, Volumnia and her son Coriolanus, not as ordinary human personalities in the manner of Plutarch, but as divine forces larger than life who tower over the remainder of the cast. Deities, however, are very difficult for actors trained in the techniques of realism to embody on the modern stage

British actor Alan Howard, who played Coriolanus in the remarkable Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1977-78, states the main problem of theatrical interpretation as follows: “I think the mother relationship is very mysterious. Is Shakespeare being absolutely realistic, or is he using some other method here? It is most peculiar that there is no reference at all in the play … to the fact that there was a father. You read bits of things about Vestal Virgins and the gods. I won't say that those are directly related, but they are suggestive.”³ Rightly suspicious of Shakespeare's surface realism and perceiving a divine origin for the character, Howard played Coriolanus quite frankly as Mars incarnate, a divinity who has always been uncomfortably both heroic and absurd. It worked very well indeed.

But an entirely successful production of Coriolanus must also indicate with equal clarity that Volumnia is a divinity as well, a deity even more powerful than Mars himself. After playing the role of Volumnia's son, Howard also observed that, “Volumnia is to all intents and purposes father and mother. She really carries out that role. She never has another child. She keeps saying things like if I had eleven more children, but there's nothing whatever in the text about it. She talks of Coriolanus as her first-born, which is very odd: you'd normally say that only if there were more. There's something peculiar here!” (p. 327). Indeed there is, and the answer to the problem may lie in classical mythology. I will propose in this paper that the myth of Coriolanus originally concerned the relationship between two major Roman deities: Juno, patroness of Rome (patroness in the OED sense of “a female tutelary deity”), and her chthonic son Mars, protective god of the city's outermost boundaries.

.....

First, the fact that Shakespeare does not mention a father in Coriolanus is extremely “suggestive,” to use Howard's word, since it was well known during the Renaissance that the god Mars had no father. In Ovid's Fasti, a popular Latin text for sixteenth-century schoolboys, the goddess Flora recites the following myth of Juno's conception of Mars by parthenogenesis:

“Mars, too, was brought to the birth by my contrivance; perhaps you do not know it, and I pray that Jupiter, who thus far knows it not, may never know it. Holy Juno grieved that Jupiter had not needed her services when Minerva was born without a mother. … I consoled her with friendly words. ‘My grief,’ quoth she, ‘is not to be assuaged with words. If Jupiter had become a father without the use of a wife, and unites both titles in his single person, why should I despair of becoming a mother without a husband, and of bringing forth without contact with a man, always supposing that I am chaste? … Help me, I pray,’ she said. … ‘Thy wish,’ quoth I, ‘will be accomplished by a flower that was sent me from the fields of Olenus.’”⁴

Mars is instantly conceived when Flora touches Juno's bosom with this mysterious blossom. In the light of Georges Dumézil's findings in Archaic Roman Religion, the strange choice of a delicate flower as the progenitor of the god probably alludes to the fact that the Roman war season began in early spring.⁵ Later in the Fasti, Juno states that she does not repent having left her former city of Carthage to become Rome's guardian deity, since “there is no people dearer to me” than the Romans: “here may I be worshipped, here may I occupy the temple with my own Jupiter. Mavors himself hath said to me, ‘I entrust these walls to thee. Thou shalt be mighty in the city of thy grandson’” (p. 323). Mavors is of course another name for Mars, father of the city's eponymous ancestor Romulus. Now, I do not intend to argue here that the Fasti was a source for Coriolanus, only that it could have provided certain mythological knowledge to the playwright, who would almost certainly have read the poem in grammar school.⁶ Moreover, it is significant that in Shakespeare's Coriolanus a senator addresses Volumnia not as a Roman matron but exactly as he would address the powerful goddess Juno: “Behold our patroness, the life of Rome!” (V.v.1.)⁷

The story of Mars's chthonic birth is retold in the sixteenth century with a salacious addition and a Christian moral tag by the Renaissance mythographer Vincenzo Cartari, who was regularly consulted by most Renaissance poets and painters:

“Why do the fables say that Juno, envious that Jove had made himself little-boy-children without her, wished to do likewise without him, and by virtue of a certain flower shown to her by Flora, as Ovid tells it, or as certain others have said, by masturbating, became pregnant with Mars and went to give birth afterwards in Thrace, where the people are extraordinarily frightful and facile in warfare? This story goes to show that wars originate for the most part in the desire for power and riches, as we see in Juno.”⁸

This Renaissance belief that Juno desired riches and power is transferred to her city of Rome in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, and Rome's “patroness,” Volumnia or Juno, speaks truly of her son's biological origins when she says, “There's no man in the world / More bound to's mother” … (V.iii.158-59). A similar Renaissance treatise in English, Batman uppon Bartholome, also speaks of Mars as “Junoes sonne, without company of her husband. The poets fained that Mars neuer had father, because he hated peace: for the nature of bastards, is commonly to be either very fearful, or very venturous, and most commonly delighting in those exercises, that be aunsiverable to heady, trayterous, and unseemly practices. Iuno found in the fieldes of Olenius a floure, with ye which as soone as she had tasted, conceived and brought forth Mars.”⁹

Just as Volumnia often seems to be angry in Coriolanus, Roman myths constantly refer to Juno as jealous and angry. Virgil records her fury at the Trojans in the Aeneid. Ovid not only points out her jealousy over Jupiter's creation of Minerva without a wife in the Fasti but also has Juno remind us that “I had a double cause to anger: I fretted at the rape of Ganymede, and my beauty was misprized by the Idaean judge” (p. 321). In his English adaptation of Cartari entitled The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction, Richard Linche describes the statue of Juno in similar terms:

The Statue of Iuno hath been framed by the auncients into the proportion of a woman of middle age, yet habited like a graue Matron, holding in the one hand a silver vessell, and in the other a sharpe-pointed speare: and although it may seeme strange to place in the hand of Iuno this warlike weapon, shee being of herselfe naturally mild, peacefull, and gentle, yet the auncients haue so defigured her, in that shee is many times also fierce, wrathful, and furious. …¹⁰

Shakespeare's equally bellicose matron Volumnia calls the patrician Menenius to welcome her son home from the wars: “my boy Martius approaches. For the love of Juno, let's go” (II.i.100-01). Then she boasts to Menenius, “O he is wounded. I thank the gods for't (II.i.121), and together they gloat over the number of scars Martius now carries on his body. Menenius sets the final total at twenty-seven, thus rendering the scene absurd in purely human terms. Later, as the incarnation of Juno Martialis, or mother of Mars, and patron goddess of Rome in the play, Volumnia berates the Roman citizens for their ungrateful treatment of her son, and then she states,

Anger's my meat; I sup upon myelf,
And so shall starve with feeding. Come let's go.
[To Virgilia] Leave this faint puling, and lament as I do,
In anger, Juno-like. Come, come, come.

(IV.ii.51-54)

These ferocious lines foreshadow the bloody sacrifice Volumnia as Juno will later (V.ii) ask of her son Coriolanus-Mars and of herself as mother for the sake of Rome. They may also remind us of Henry IV's grim description of the motherland during civil war as daubing “her lips with her own children's blood” (I Henry IV: I.i.6).

In fact the bloodthirsty Roman mother in Shakespeare's play is notably unlike Plutarch's more human Volumnia, who weeps tears of joy when her boy wins the wreath of victory. M. W. MacCallum points out that she does very little in the “Life” other than persuade her son not to invade Rome.¹¹ Above all she does not ask Coriolanus to stand for the consulship. Plutarch's Martius enters politics on his own volition and freely displays his wounds to the populace, thus omitting the most painful scene in Shakespeare's dramatic version, namely III, ii. MacCallum also notes of the mother in Plutarch that “she is less masculine and masterful [than Shakespeare's Volumnia]. … Indeed, from Plutarch's hints. … It would be quite legitimate to picture her as an essentially womanly woman, high-souled and dutiful, but finding her chosen sphere in the home, overflowing with sympathy and affection, and failing in her obligations as a widowed mother only by a lack of sternness” (p. 497). This gentle matron apparently becomes Coriolanus' wife Virgilia in the tragedy.

Plutarch is the first of Shakespeare's classical sources to introduce the motif of the three women who save Rome from the wrath of Coriolanus, calling the mother Volumnia, the wife Virgilia, and identifying the third lady as Valeria, sister of Publicola. In Livy's The Roman Historie (translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1600), the hero's mother is called Veturia, his wife is Volumnia, and no third lady is mentioned. Livy's Veturia is simply described as “an aged woman … mourning and bewailing exceedingly above the rest. …”¹² Thus Shakespeare's terrifying female character, who counts over the bloody wounds of her son and sees him as the ruthless harvester of his enemies, appears to be an original product of the English stage, although she has her roots in ancient Roman religion.

As many scholars have noted, Shakespeare's Coriolanus—when not revealing in an unprejudiced manner the self-interest of the various factions within the city—concentrates psychologically on the mother-son relationship. Indeed Martius' desire to please his mother in everything is remarkable even to the plebeians in the first scene of the play. Moreover, Volumnia's peculiar love for blood and cicatrices on her son's body is markedly inhuman, although we should remember that savage blood sacrifices were commonly offered in pre-classical antiquity to the Earth Mother in her terrible aspect. Apparently Shakespeare senses that Plutarch's pseudo-historical Volumnia in some way embodies that dark and mysterious aspect of the Indo-European Triple Goddess who presides over the human extremities of birth and death and who in Rome was called Juno. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare was well acquainted with the ancient notion of the Triple Goddess since he mentions triple Hecate in many of his plays.¹³ He knew Virgil's description of the sacred rite of the Triple Goddess as it is described in Book IV of the Aeneid, and he knew the great hymn to Isis in Book XI of Apuleius' The Golden Ass which states that all forms of the moon and earth goddess are but aspects of the one.¹⁴ Thus it is interesting to note the use of mysterious music in the recent BBC television production of Coriolanus to announce each appearance of the three women together.

According to Dumézil, Juno synthesized all three primordial functions of the Indo-European Feminine Principle—mother, warrior and purification—although in Rome she was eventually “confined to the two functions of sovereignty and fecundity” (I, 300). Gail Kern Paster reminds us that when we first see the three ladies together in I, ii, of Coriolanus, “The entire scene, composed only of women, is insistent on its emphasis on generations of women giving birth and nurturing children. …”¹⁵ Shakespeare's Volumnia, however, is also particularly proud of her son's ability as a harvester of men or as a figure of death:

                    His bloody brow
With his mail'd hand then wiping, forth he goes,
Like to a harvest-man that's task'd to mow
                    Or all or lose his hire.

(I.iii.34-37)

E. O. James informs us that modern archaeological studies have revealed the mother goddess to be widely recognized in antiquity as “the guardian of the dead—an underworld deity concerned alike with the crops and the seed-corn buried beneath the earth.”¹⁶ Such discoveries corroborate the literary evidence in Apuleius, where the Great Mother is hailed even if she “be called terrible Proserpine, by reason of the deadly howlings which Thou yieldest, that hast power with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts which appear unto men, and to keep them down in the closures of the Earth …” (p. 262). Thus, although Shakespeare created in Coriolanus an unbelievable woman from the point of view of common sense, he achieved a very convincing portrait of this mythological female power in the relentless character of Volumnia, flanked by the chaste Valeria and the dove-eyed wife and mother Virgilia, the remaining two aspects of the Triple Goddess and of the moon. Menenius greets them accordingly: “How now, my as fair as noble ladies—and the moon, were she earthly, no nobler” (II.i.97-98). Moreover, Coriolanus himself observes, “My mother bows, / As if Olympus to a molehill should / In supplication nod” (29-31), and later he admits, “Ladies, you deserve / To have a temple built you” (V.ii.206-07).

In addition, Ralph Berry is surely correct when he suggests that, in another sense, Shakespeare's Volumnia symbolizes the city of Rome itself.¹⁷ Both Plutarch and Shakespeare understood the ancient Indo-European notion of the city as Feminine. Although the enraged and vindictive Coriolanus eventually snarls that “My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon / This enemy town” (IV.iii.23-24), the normal Indo-European typically sees his place of nativity as his true mother to whom he must be returned in death and as the place he must never harm. According to Erich Neumann, “Like the gate, enclosure and cattle pen, the collective village and city is a symbol of the Feminine. Their establishment originally began with the marking of a circle, the conjuring of the Great Round, which reveals its feminine nature equally well as a containing periphery or as a womb and center. The latest ramifications of this symbolism are the goddesses crowned with walls and the feminine names of cities.”¹⁸ Even Volumnia's name—the name chosen by both Plutarch and Shakespeare—comes from the word meaning “enclosed space.” Thus, as the Feminine Principle incarnate, she is for her warrior son the source of both birth and death; she is also the city which he has been trained to defend and which he must not enter as an aggressor. For this reason, only Volumnia can actually stop Coriolanus from breaking through the gates of his native Rome with the revived Volscian army. To do so would be a forbidden act redolent with sexual implications, as Volumnia reminds him: “thou shalt no sooner / March to assault thy country than to tread / (Trust to't, thou shalt not) on thy mother's womb / That brought thee to this world” (V.iii.122-25).

A servant in IV, v, comments that “war, in some sort, may be said to be a ravisher” (226-27), and, as Rome's greatest warrior, Coriolanus has certainly been a ravisher of cities. Shakespeare shows him to the audience in I, iv, driving himself bodily through the gates of Corioles with a sexual battle cry debasing to the sacred rite of Hymen: “come on! … we'll beat them to their wives” (40-41). If we recall the famous body imagery of Menenius in I, i, we may add to his analysis of the state that Martius is Rome's phallus, as Berry has noted (p. 302). Indeed, Martius cries out to his fellow soldiers, “O, me alone! Make you a sword of me?” (I.v.76). But later, when he wishes to turn that same sword against his native city, Volumnia reminds him—by her very presence in his camp—that he will be raping his own motherland, “our dear nurse” (V.iii.110). Furiously, he tries to stand firm in his resolve by denying his kinship to both Volumnia and Rome. In words much like those of Oedipus, who calls himself defiantly a child of Fortune, Coriolanus growls,

                    Let the Volsces
Plough Rome and harrow Italy, I'll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself,
And knew no other kin.

(V.iii.33-37)

But when he stands face to face with his mother a few moments later, he quickly changes his tune:

                    You gods, I [prate],
And the most noble mother of the world
Leave unsaluted. Sink my knee, i'th'
earth; [Kneels]
Of thy deep duty more impression show
Than that of common sons.

(V.iii.48-52; emphasis mine)

Coriolanus is indeed no common son.

Nevertheless, even the proud claim of autochthony turns against the hero, since he then becomes a child of “the place” alone. Mircea Eliade tells us that,

among Europeans of today there lingers an obscure feeling of mystical unity with the native Earth; and this is not just a secular sentiment of love for one's country or province, nor admiration for the familiar landscape or veneration for the ancestors buried for generations around the village churches. There is also something quite different; the mystical experience of autochthony, the profound feeling of having come from the soil, of having been born of the Earth in the same way that the Earth, with her inexhaustible fecundity, gives birth to rocks, rivers, trees and flowers. It is in this sense that autochthony should be understood: men feel that they are people of the place, and this is a feeling of cosmic relatedness deeper than that of familial and ancestral solidarity.¹⁹

In the play, Volumnia then reminds Coriolanus of his doubly awkward position in relationship both to her and to the city of Rome.

                    Thou knowst great son
The end of war's uncertain; but this is certain,
That if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name
Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses;
Whose chronicle thus writ: “The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wip'd it out,
Destroy'd his country, and his name remains
To th' ensuing age abhorr'd.”

(V.iii.140-48)

We all know the indelicate English equivalent of that name reserved for violators of the mother. On the other hand, it is Volumnia herself who trained her son to his life of violence so that he could protect her and conquer for her: “had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Martius, I had rather eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action” (I.iii.22-25). In V, iii, she reminds Coriolanus, “Thou art my warrior, / I holp to frame thee” (62-63), as indeed she did. This is clearly the voice of the Terrible Mother, the goddess of “the place” to which we all must eventually return.

Shakespeare completes the mythical persona of the Triple Goddess, as I have previously suggested, with the other two women in Coriolanus. Valeria's mythic origin is the goddess Diana, warrior-huntress and the new moon, who is the first aspect of the Great Goddess. Coriolanus hails her in V, iii, as “The moon of Rome, chaste as the icicle / That's curdied by the frost from purest snow / And hangs on Dian's temple” (65-67). Characteristically, it is Valeria, or the moon huntress, who describes young Martius' heroic chase after the butterfly which he ultimately tears to pieces with his teeth: “A' my word, the father's son” (I.iii.57). According to Glynne Wickham, Valeria is “something of an enigma” who has no real function in the play,²⁰ which suggests that Shakespeare may have included her mainly to complete the persona of the Triple Goddess. Virgilia is Coriolanus' adored wife and the mother of his son. The hero describes her as having “doves' eyes, / Which can make the gods forsworn” (V.iii.27-28), thus associating her with Venus, goddess of love and fecundity. Together Venus and Mars were symbolic during the Renaissance of discord overcome by love and thus of concord, an idea which may have originated in Book I of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. Virgilia represents the full moon and the nubile aspect of the Triple Goddess. With the grandmother Volumnia as crone and the waning moon, Valeria and Virgilia are all three at last victorious over Coriolanus' passion for revenge against his native city, even though—as they are all aware—their victory will result in his death at the hands of the Volscians.

They love and admire him, but they do not mourn him for one minute, even though Coriolanus himself cries out,

O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But, for your son, believe it—O, believe it—
Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd,
If not most mortal to him. But let it come.

(V.iii.102-09)

With this speech Coriolanus accepts his sacrificial role in relation to the Feminine Principle. Similarly, the god Mars was laid to rest each year in Rome through the ritual sacrifice and dismemberment of the October horse, a ceremony to be discussed later. This is the nature of things, as Coriolanus-Mars well knows.

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Shakespeare's bloody hero does indeed appear to be Mars personified. As M. C. Bradbrook has observed, the figures of both Coriolanus and Antony seem “to expand” on stage until they “fill the whole universe to become a cosmic power, like something out of mythology.”²¹ Other scholars have related the antisocial behavior of Coriolanus to the Politics of Aristotle, who says (in a 1598 English translation) that “he that can not abide to live in companie, or through sufficiencie hath need of nothing, is not esteemed a part or member of a Cittie, but is either a beast or a God.”²² Shakespeare may indeed have been influenced by this Aristotelian notion when making Plutarch's Coriolanus his own. However, he carefully portrays Coriolanus not as a sympathetic albeit misguided human hero (if human he is ridiculous rather than tragic) but rather as the war god Mars and as his emblematic beast, the serpent or dragon, as well. Coriolanus is both god and beast in the shape of a man, perhaps an insinuation that war itself is beastly.

Within the play, Cominius describes Coriolanus in battle as Mars besmeared with gore, but he is also the hot planetary influence of Mars:

                    His word, death's stamp,
Where it did mark, it took; from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was tim'd with dying cries. Alone he ent'red
The mortal gate of th' city, which he painted
With shameless destiny; aidless came off,
And with a sudden reinforcement struck
Corioles like a planet.

(II.ii.107-14)

Menenius sees Coriolanus as inhuman and metallic, a war machine to be used: “When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a corslet with his eye, talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander” (V.iv.18-22).

Tremendous noise is another well-known attribute of the god Mars, as we know from Venus' noisy warning to Aeneas of Mars' approach in Book VIII, lines 522-32, of the Aeneid. Thus Titus Lartius says of Coriolanus on the battlefield:

                                                  Thou wast a soldier
Even to Cato's wish, not fierce and terrible
Only in strokes, but, with thy grim looks and
The thunder-like percussion of thy sounds,
Thou mad'st thine enemies shake, as if the world
Were feverous and did tremble.

(I.iv.56-81)

Later, when Coriolanus returns to Rome heralded by the brazen sound of trumpets, Volumnia boasts of her son as though he were indeed divine:

These are the ushers of Martius: before him
He carries noise, and behind him he leaves tears.
Death, that dark spirit, in's nervy arm doth lie,
Which being advanc'd, declines and then men die.

(II.i.158-61)

Since the activity of Mars as a ravisher of cities is a popular metaphor of male sexuality, even this aspect of Coriolanus' personality is mentioned in the play. The people's tribune Junius Brutus comments on the post-war sexual popularity of Coriolanus whom women pursue, “As if whatsoever god who leads him / Were slily crept into his human powers, / And gave him graceful posture” (II.i.219-21). The comment serves no function in the play other than further to associate Martius with Mars.

References to the dragon-like nature of Coriolanus provide more evidence that Shakespeare intended the character to be recognized as Mars. The dragon was the mythical servant of the Great Goddess who guarded the earth's riches and who drew the chariot of the moon across the sky.²³ The dramatist obviously knew Ovid's story of Medea in Book VII of The Metamorphoses when Jason swears by the Triple Goddess to marry the Princess of Colchis if she will help him overcome the dragon which guards the golden fleece and yoke the fiery bulls. In Book III of the same poem, Ovid also describes the serpent of Mars which guards the sacred waters and the land itself, the serpent which Cadmus must kill in order to found Thebes: “There was a spring with silver streames that forth thereof did flow. / Here lurked in his lowring den God Mars his griesly Snake / With golden scales and firie eyes beswolne with poyson blake.”²⁴ Both Jason and Cadmus sowed the dragon's teeth from which sprang armed men to defend the land. And, like the dragon of Mars, Shakespeare's Coriolanus has only one real purpose—to guard his mother's treasures.

In Act IV, the Volscian general Aufidius—an all too human warrior capable of both military force and political art—greets Coriolanus quite openly as the god of battle who has just changed sides:

                                        Why, thou Mars, I tell thee,
We have a power on foot; and I had purpose
Once more to hew thy target from thy brawn,
Or lose mine arm for't.

(IV.v.118-21)

And a servant reports on the succeeding treatment of the exiled Coriolanus by the Volscians in terms of ceremonies befitting a god: “Why he is so made on there within as if he were son and heir to Mars; set at the upper end o' th' table; no question ask'd him by any of the senators but they stand bald before him” (IV.v.191-94). This increasing recognition of Coriolanus as the god incarnate is then communicated to Rome by Cominius who reports,

He is their god; he leads them like a thing
Made by some other deity than Nature,
That shapes men better. …

(IV.vi.90-92)

Finally, Menenius completes the deification process by telling Sicinius in Rome that Coriolanus “wants nothing of a god / But eternity and a heaven to throne in” (V.iv.23-24). He is not a man but an irresistible “thing” throughout the play and thus a divine creation and a divinity in his own right.²⁵

Even Coriolanus' ability to shift his allegiance to a city other than his birthplace is typical of Mars. Robert Graves reminds us that “Thracian Ares loves battle for its own sake … he never favors one city or party more than another, but fights on this side or that, as inclination prompts him, delighting in the slaughter of men and the sacking of towns.”²⁶ Moreover, the Roman Mars, like Coriolanus, was always associated with the patrician class, and Dumézil believes that in Rome “Mars was not recognized as their god by the plebeians, who were … so often opposed to the wars which the patricians used to wage” (I, 213). Hence Junius Brutus complains about Coriolanus' shocking inhumanity towards the people as follows: “You speak a' th' people / As if you were a god, to punish; not / A man of their infirmity” (III.i.80-82)—behavior which eventually and quite properly causes the plebeians to exile Coriolanus from the city. And one of Shakespeare's ordinary citizens in the play tells Coriolanus, “You have not indeed lov'd the common people” (II.iii.92-93).

Mars, again like Coriolanus, is concerned only with combat and not with legal disagreements leading up to war or with later peace treaties. According to Dumézil, he is the god who “makes one fight; he breaks loose, saevit, in the arms and in the weapons of the combatants” (I, 209). In Shakespeare's tragedy, Martius says of his copious bleeding before the gates of Corioles, “My work hath yet not warm'd me. … The blood I drop is rather physical / Than dangerous to me” (I.v.17-19); and he leads the now equally maddened Romans to victory over the Volscians. Dumézil further notes that the Romans also called Mars caecus or blind, since “At a certain stage of furor he abandons himself to his nature, destroying friend as well as foe, just as the youth Horatius, still drunk with blood, slays his sister after having slain the Curiatii” (I, 229). Most significantly, in Rome a horse was the annual October sacrifice to the god in order to bring him once more under control, as Shakespeare could have learned from Plutarch (Roman Questions 97) and other classical sources, as well as from Cartari (p. 408). After the battle of Corioles, the only reward Coriolanus will accept from the Roman general Cominius for his bravery is a war horse, the general's most noble steed and a known emblem of Mars.

Unfortunately, Mars can never change his nature and live within the city, since he is essentially the god of its outermost boundaries beyond the cultivated fields. Mars “within” can only mean dissension and civil war. Hence, once Coriolanus returns to his native city, a Roman reports to a Volscian that “There hath been in Rome strange insurrections; the people against the senators, patricians and nobles” (IV.iii.13-15). The Romans soon exile Coriolanus as an “enemy to the people and his country” (III.iii.17-18), an act in complete accord with Roman religious custom. Dumézil tells us that “Until the founding of the temple and cult by Augustus in favor of Mars Ultor, the avenger of Caesar (pro ultione paterna, Suet. Aug.29.1), the sanctuaries of Mars conformed to one rule, explicitly formulated: as a kind of sentinel, he has his place not in the city, where peace should reign, where the armed troops do not enter, but outside of the precincts, on the threshold of the wilderness which is not, though it has been so called, his domain, but from which come dangers, and especially the armed enemy” (I, 206). The Campus Martius, a strip of land along the banks of the Tiber, was therefore devoted to Mars, and there in spring and fall the Romans raced horses in honor of the god and practiced the martial arts. A temple of Mars was also dedicated at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. extra portam Capenam, or outside the Capena gate. This information was generally known during the Renaissance, since Cartari informs his readers that the Romans “depicted Mars outside of the towns, showing in this manner that war is always to be kept as far away as possible. And because the Romans were wary of keeping in the city those deities who, they thought, were in charge of harmful things, they put the temple of Bellona outside, and that of Mars also” (p. 388). Thus Shakespeare's plebeians in Coriolanus are historically and religiously correct in escorting the god incarnate out of their city with the ceremonial cry, “Come, come, let's see him out at the gates, come” (III.iii.141-42).

Perhaps the principal reason for arguing that Coriolanus is meant to personify the god Mars lies in the dehumanized rigidity of his character. Men can alter their natures somewhat. They can, unlike Coriolanus, play a variety of roles as policy demands, an ideal upheld in Geffrey Whitney's emblem “Marte et arte,” which reads in part:

Where courage great, and consaile good doe goe,
With lasting fame, the victorie is wonne:
But separate theise, then feare the ouerthrowe,
And strengthe alone, dothe vnto ruine ronne:
Then Captaines good, must ioyne theise two, in one:
And not presume with this, or that, alone.(27)

Aufidius, the general so loved by Coriolanus-Mars, is just such a politic military man, as we see when he accepts Coriolanus' offer to lead the Volscians against Rome and again when he turns the Volscians against Coriolanus by his clever rhetoric. But gods cannot alter their personalities. They can transform their external shapes but never their inner natures; and Coriolanus' inflexible nature is emphasized over and over again in the play. Volumnia, who wishes her son to change from soldier to politician in peacetime, complains that he is “too absolute” (III.ii.39). All the puzzled Martius can reply is,

Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say, I play
The man I am.

(III.ii.14-16)

It is necessarily in the nature of Mars, and thus in the nature of Coriolanus, to be proud and aggressive. Sicinius first remarks that “Such a nature, / Tickled with good success, disdains the shadow / Which he treads on at noon” (I.ii.259-61), and later he tells the plebeians how to deal with such a “surly nature” (II.iii.195). After Coriolanus attacks the Roman rabble with his sword, a patrician plays on the name of Mars when he observes that “This man has marr'd his fortune,” to which Menenius replies:

His nature is too noble for the world;
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for's power to thunder. His heart's his mouth;
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent,
And being angry, does forget that ever
He heard the name of death.

(III.i.245-59)

Even Aufidius comments on the pride and inflexibility of his rival:

                                                  He bears himself more proudlier,
Even to my person, than I thought he would
When first I did embrace him; yet his nature
In that's no changeling, and I must excuse
What cannot be amended.

(IV.vii.8-12)

He also implies that it is in Coriolanus' nature “Not to be other than one thing, not moving / From th' casque to th'cushion” (IV.vii.42-43), the same in peace as in war.

In the end, however, it is the frustrated and very human general, Aufidius, who reacts with murderous fury when Coriolanus uncharacteristically turns from war to peace in response to Volumnia's pleas for the safety of Mother Rome. No longer Mars in the service of Corioles, Coriolanus is now to Aufidius that son of Mars and Venus, the “boy of tears” or Cupid who runs weeping to his mother when he is stung by bees—as portrayed, for example, by Lucas Cranach in the “Venus and Cupid” of the National Gallery, London. But Aufidius wants a war god, not a love god, to advance his military career and the affairs of his own city. The violent response of Coriolanus to this suggested but impossible transformation from Mars to Cupid allows Aufidius and the conspirators to kill him. Thus the god Mars—now disarmed by the triple Goddess and ambivalent between love and war—becomes a bloody sacrifice to peace and to all the peaceful values of Civitas which must now rule in Rome, and in Corioles as well, during the winter season when Mars sleeps.

.....

John Holloway has correctly identified the last scene of Coriolanus as a classical sparagmos invited by Martius himself: “Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads, / Stain all your edges on me” (V.vi.111-12). As Holloway states, “in Coriolanus's death the situation is unmistakably one of the now isolated figure suffering what has the nature of a ritual killing required by society. It is death ritualized into a social event.”²⁸ Paster agrees that the tragedy is highly ritualistic and very public throughout, further pointing out that “The absence of private moment … takes on greater significance for the idea of Rome through Shakespeare's use of ceremony as a key structural device” (p. 129). Along these same lines, I believe that several important scenes in Coriolanus can be traced back to ancient rituals in honor of Mars and Juno.

First, as Dumézil explains, the Romans held horse races on February 27 and March 14 on the Campus Martius in honor of the god. These races, staged to arouse the martial spirit, were followed by victory ceremonies for the winners. Then, formally to initiate the war season, the Roman general touched the “lance called Mars” while speaking the words “Mars Uigila” (“Mars wake up”) before he set forth on a campaign (I, 207). This ceremony, which was intended to stimulate the god to action, is reflected by Shakespeare in the glorification of Martius on the battlefield in I, vi: “make you a sword of me?” (76). Cartari, who passes on to the Renaissance a great deal of information about the worship of Mars in ancient Rome, actually prints an illustration of Mars as a sword enclosed in a box-like structure until it is time to awaken him (p. 400). We should recall as well that after the defeat of Corioles, Martius refuses a soldier's share of the spoils of war, as would the god, but he accepts a horse from the Roman general:

I mean to stride your steed, and at all times
To undercrest your good addition
To th' fairness of my power.

(I.ix.71-73)

Now, when Plutarch wonders in Roman Questions why a horse is sacrificed annually to Mars, one answer he considers is that there may be a likeness between Mars and the horse: “Is it because the horse is a spirited, bellicose, and consequently martial animal, and because what one sacrifices to the gods is principally the things which they like and which have a connection with them?”²⁹

For whatever reason, a horse was indeed sacrificed annually to Mars during the festival of the Equus October in order to lay the god to rest for the winter, as Cartari explains to his Renaissance readers (pp. 398-99). Plutarch says that, “the right-hand horse of the winning chariot” in a race was killed by a javelin thrust. The animal was then dismembered and its bleeding tail was carried to the circular hearth of the Regia where the blood was sprinkled.³⁰ In this way the aggressive energy of the god was ceremonially given back to the earth (or Juno) by the flamen of Mars. In a similar sacrificial ritual, the Volscians attack Coriolanus in the last scene of the tragedy with the ritual cry, “Tear him to pieces!” (V.vi.120). After they have stabbed Coriolanus to death, they then do formal honors to his bloody corpse. Aufidius reverently intones the eulogy:

                                                  My rage is gone,
And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up.
Help, three a' the chiefest soldiers, I'll be one.
Beat thou the drum, that it speak mournfully:
Trail your steel pikes. Though in this city he
Hath widowed and unchilded many a one,
Which to this hour bewail the injury,
Yet he shall have a noble memory.

(V.vi.146-53)

Coriolanus has been a play about anger,³¹ but now rage melts away with the death of Mars. According to Dumézil, after the sacrifice of the October horse on the Ides in Rome, the sacred lance in which the deity resided and the soldiers' arms were lustrated on October 19 and stored away for the winter (I, 206). Dumézil goes on to observe that to these rituals, “we must surely add, on the Calends, the ritual of the tigillum sororium, explained by the legend of the young Horatius, representing the type of warrior who is submitted to a purification after the necessary or superfluous violences of war.” In the words of Aufidius, “My rage is gone / And I am struck with sorrow.”

Secondly, Volumnia, on her return from the Volscian camp, is ritually hailed in Rome as the goddess Juno:

Behold our patroness, the life of Rome!
Call all your tribes together, praise the gods,
And make triumphant fires! Strew flowers before them!

(V.v.1-3)

This processional scene should be staged in the theater clearly as a theophany. Heralded by musical flourishes, the three women representing the Triple Goddess pass triumphantly over the stage with Senators in reverent attendance. This is a formal ceremony in honor of Juno. It looks beyond the sacrifice of Martius to the New Year, which begins in his month of March, and to a ceremony Shakespeare may also have learned about while reading the Fasti. In Book III, the war god Mars describes the Matronalia, a festival which celebrates the saving of Rome by the Sabine women who stood, with their children, between their Sabine fathers and Roman husbands and stopped the war. It also celebrates the beginning of springtime and the fruitful season of new birth. In Fasti, the war god tells the poet Ovid, “‘My mother loves brides; a crowd of mothers throngs my temple; so pious a reason is above all becoming to her and me. Bring ye flowers to the goddess; this goddess delights in flowering plants; with fresh flowers wreathe your heads. Say ye, ‘Thou Lucina, hast bestowed on us the light of life …’” (p. 139). Thus the Senator in Coriolanus shouts “Behold our patroness, the life of Rome!” and orders the tribes to strew flowers before Volumnia, Virgilia, and Valeria.

He also commands the people to “make triumphant fires!” as well, a detail not present in Plutarch's “Life of Coriolanus.” This is very likely a reference to the sacred fire of Vesta within every household and in the temple of Vesta as well. According to Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City, “There was one day in the year—among the Romans it was the first of March—when it was the duty of every family to put out the sacred fire and light another immediately. But to procure this new fire certain rites had to be scrupulously followed.”³² Ovid reports in the Fasti that the Roman New Year began in March when, after the laurel branches are renewed in the public places, “the withered laurel is withdrawn from the [Ilian] Vestal hearth, that Vesta also may make a brave show, dressed in fresh leaves. Besides, ’tis said that a new fire is lighted in her secret shrine, and the rekindled flame gains strength” (p. 131). It seems probable, therefore, that the victory ceremony in the last act of Coriolanus derives from Shakespeare's understanding of Roman rituals in honor of the New Year and of Juno's special celebration, the Matronalia. The Goddess, in her three aspects, accepts the homage of her city with dignity and accepts the sacrifice of her terrible son without sorrow or any sign of mourning, knowing full well that he will rise again whenever she needs him. Indeed the First Senator reminds us of this promise of renewal when he orders the populace to “[Unshout] the noise that banish'd Martius! / Repeal him with the welcome of his mother” (V.v.4-5).

This, then, is the hidden mythological infrastructure of the Coriolanus story—strongly suggested by Shakespeare, although muted by Plutarch—together with the probable ceremonial patterns underlying the play. Like the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, which were also based on seasonal rituals, Coriolanus is primarily concerned with the actions of deities and the effect of these actions on the polis. But we should keep in mind that deities incarnate are in the theater as much men and women as they are gods. Their recognizable human personalities allow the poet to characterize for an audience the powerful cosmic forces which operate within the human individual, within the body politic, and within the rhythms of nature herself. In this play, as in all of his tragedies, Shakespeare has once again revealed the mysterious workings of the universe. The tragedy of chthonic Coriolanus, the banished military hero who goes off “alone / Like to the lonely dragon, that his fen / Makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen” (III.iii.29-30), is as inevitable in our world as the tragedy of chthonic Oedipus, the fertility hero who has too intimately known his goddess mother. The Feminine Principle makes use of such recurrent masculine energies in complete accord with natural law.

Shakespeare demonstrates in the tragedy of Coriolanus that although the Great Goddess herself has created and dearly loves the aggressive personality of her divine son Mars, she never hesitates to sacrifice him when the time comes to transform her soldiers back into citizens. The archetypal myth of Coriolanus, who could not become a peaceful citizen at his mother's bidding, informs us that this is the nature of things. At the same time, in Shakespeare's dramatization of the myth, the true relationship between mother and son must always remain a sacred mystery: to use the words of Volumnia, it is “one of those mysteries which heaven / Will not have earth to know” (IV.ii.35-36).

Notes

1. John W. Velz, “Cracking Strong Curbs Asunder: Roman Destiny and the Roman Hero in Coriolanus,” English Literary Renaissance, 13 (Winter 1983), 58-69.

2. Northrop Frye, “Literature and Myth,” in Relations of Literary Study: Essays on Interdisciplinary Contributions (New York, 1967), p. 34.

3. J. R. Mulryne, “Coriolanus at Stratford-Upon-Avon: Three Actors' Remarks,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (Summer 1978), 327.

4. Ovid, Fasti, trans. Sir James Frazer, The Loeb Classical Library edition (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 275-79.

5. See Georges Dumézil, Archaic Roman Religion, trans. Philip Krapp (Chicago, 1970), I, 206.

6. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke (Urbana, 1944), II, 573.

7. All quotations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

8. Vincenzo Cartari, Le Imagini de i Dei de gli Antichi (Venice, 1571), p. 395, trans. mine.

9. Stephan Batman, trans., Batman vppon Bartholome, his Booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (London, 1582), p. 130^v.

10. Richard Linche, The Fountain of Ancient Fiction (London, 1599), sig. L ij.

11. M. W. MacCallum, Shakespeare's Roman Plays and their Background (1910; rpt. New York, 1967), p. 496.

12. Quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York, 1966), V, 503-04.

13. See V. ii. 383-86 in A Midsummer Night's Dream; III. ii. 257-60 in Hamlet; I. i. 109-10 in King Lear; and III. v. in Macbeth when Hecate herself appears with the three witches.

14. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, trans. William Adlington (New York, 1962), pp. 261-62. For Shakespeare's use of Apuleius as a source for several plays, see D. T. Starnes, “Shakespeare and Apuleius,” PMLA, 60 (1945), 1021-50; and James A. S. McPeek, “The Psyche Myth and A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 23 (Winter 1972), 69-79.

15. Gail Kern Paster, “To Starve with Feeding: The City in Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 128.

16. E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study (New York, 1959), p. 32.

17. Ralph Berry, “Sexual Imagery in Coriolanus,” Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 302.

18. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 2nd ed., trans. Ralph Mannheim (Princeton, 1963), p. 283.

19. Mircea Eliade, Myth, Dreams, and Mysteries, trans. Philip Mairet (New York, 1960), p. 164.

20. Glynne Wickham, “Coriolanus: Shakespeare's Tragedy in Rehearsal and Performance,” in Later Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London, 1966), p. 171.

21. M. C. Bradbrook, The Living Monument: Shakespeare and the Theatre of His Time (London, 1979), pp. 171-72.

22. See F. N. Lees, “Coriolanus, Aristotle, and Bacon,” Review of English Studies, N.S. 1 (1950), pp. 114-17; G. K. Hunter, “The Last Tragic Heroes,” in Coriolanus: A Casebook, ed. B. A. Brockman (London, 1977), pp. 258-67; and Holt, pp. 27-41.

23. Ad de Vries, “Dragon,” Dictionary of Symbols and Imagery, 2nd ed., 1976.

24. Ovid, Metamorphoses. The XV Bookes, trans. Wm. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), p. 30.

25. For a detailed analysis of the progressive dehumanization of Coriolanus in the play, see Christopher Givan, “Shakespeare's Coriolanus: The Premature Epitaph and the Butterfly,” Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 143-58.

26. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Baltimore, 1955), I, 73.

27. Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586), ed. Henry Green (1866; rpt. New York, 1967), p. 47.

28. John Holloway, The Story of the Night (London, 1961), p. 130.

29. Quoted in Dumézil, I, 215-16.

30. Quoted in Dumézil, I, 215.

31. See Herman Heuer, “From Plutarch to Shakespeare: A Study of Coriolanus,” Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1957), 51.

32. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small (1873; rpt. Garden City, n. d.), p. 26.