Bid them all home; he’s gone, and we’ll no further.
(iV. ii. i.)
It seems probable that this last indignity, a hurt to his pride more galling than any refusal of office or sentence of banishment, drives Coriolanus to his fury of vindictiveness; and that the failure of the nobles to protect him from the outrage has in his eyes confounded them with his more ignoble enemies. Indeed, he almost says as much in his speech to Aufidius. In that speech, as we have seen, Shakespeare adheres more closely to North than in any other continuous passage in the play, and the greatest variation occurs in a line that would apply with peculiar aptness to the purely Shakespearian episode of the last affront, and that sets forth the main cause of the exile’s resentment. In Plutarch, after saying that only the surname of Coriolanus remains to him, he continues:
The rest the envie and crueltie of the people of Rome have taken from me, by the sufferance of the dastardly nobilitie and magistrates, who have forsaken me, and let me be banished by the people.
This becomes:
The cruelty and envy of the people,
Permitted by our dastard nobles, who
Have all forsook me, hath devour’d the rest:
And suffer’d me by the voice of slaves to be
Whoop’d out of Rome.