Scandal’d the suppliants for the people, call’d them
Time-pleasers, flatterers, foes to nobleness.
(iII. i. 43.)
Sometimes the debt is confined to a single phrase or word and yet is unmistakable. When Coriolanus has reached Antium, Plutarch quotes Homer on Ulysses:
So dyd he enter into the enemies towne.
In the play Coriolanus before the house of Aufidius soliloquises:
My love’s upon
This enemy town. I’ll enter.
(iV. iv. 23.)
Now and then some apparently haphazard detail can be explained if we trace it to its source. Thus, Cominius talks of the “seventeen battles” which the hero had fought since his first exploit. Why seventeen? Doubtless Shakespeare had in his mind the account of the candidature, when Marcius showed the wounds “which he had receyved in seventeene yeres service at the warres, and in many sundrie battells.” In Plutarch the number of years is prescribed by his mythical chronology, for he dates the beginning of Marcius’ career from the wars with the Tarquins, which were supposed to have broken out in 245 a.u.c., while Corioli was taken in 262: but when transferred to the battles it becomes a mere survival which serves at most to give apparent definiteness.