Marcius is thus the only son of his mother and she a widow; but these reminiscences show how strictly the tenderness, and still more the indulgence, usual in such circumstances, have been banished from that home. In Plutarch the boy seeks a military career from his irresistible natural bent:
Martius being more inclined to the warres, then any young gentleman of his time: beganne from his Childehood to geve him self to handle weapons, and daylie dyd exercise him selfe therein.
In Shakespeare the direction and stimulus are much more directly attributed to his mother, and it is she who first despatches him to the field. This she herself expressly states in her admonition to Virgilia:
Volumnia. I pray you, daughter, sing; or express yourself in a more comfortable sort: if my son were my husband, I should freelier rejoice in that absence wherein he won honour, than in the embracements of his bed where he would show most love. When yet he was but tender-bodied and the only son of my womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way, when for a day of kings’ entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person, that it was no better than picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir, was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame. To a cruel war I sent him; from whence he returned, his brows bound with oak. I tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.
Virgilia. But had he died in the business, madam; how then?
Volumnia. Then his good report should have been my son; I therein would have found issue. Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Marcius, I had rather had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.
(I. iii. 1.)
He is the object of her love because he is to be the ideal which she adores. She trains him to all the excellence she understands, and would have him a captain of Rome’s armies and a force in the state. She has to the full the sentiment of noblesse oblige, and is inspired by the same feeling which in Plutarch moves Marcius to bid the patricians show that
they dyd not so muche passe the people in power and riches as they dyd exceede them in true nobilitie and valliantnes.
She is full of the virtues and prejudices of her class, and, with the self-consciousness of an aristocrat, looks from the plebs only for the obedience and approval due to their betters. They are quite unqualified for self-government or for the criticism of those above them. In comparison with the noble Coriolanus, the people, whom she calls the rabble, are “cats” (iv. ii. 34). Naturally she is tenacious of the supremacy of her order, and would fain see it make good its threatened privileges. She remonstrates with her son for his contumacy: