But she, putting him aside, bade him first answer her question.
‘Am I the mother of Gaius Marcius,’ she asked reproachfully, ‘or a prisoner in the hands of the leader of the Volscians? Alas! had I not been a mother, my country had still been free.’ As his mother said these words, his wife and children fell at his knees and clung to him. His mother’s words did what nothing else had been able to do, for the proud patrician could not bear to listen to her reproaches.
With tears in his eyes he cried: ‘O my mother, thou hast saved Rome, but thou hast lost thy son.’
Then he led the Volscian army away from the city, and restored to the Romans the towns which the enemy had taken.
Some legends tell that the Volscians were so angry with Coriolanus for deserting them, that they slew him as a traitor; but others say that he lived in exile until he was an old man.
Weary of exile, he is said to have cried: ‘Only an old man knows how hard it is to live in a far country.’
“O my mother, thou hast saved Rome, but thou hast lost thy son.”