BRUTUS.
Come, sir, come; we know you well enough.
MENENIUS.
You know neither me, yourselves, nor anything. You are ambitious for poor knaves’ caps and legs. You wear out a good wholesome forenoon in hearing a cause between an orange-wife and a faucet-seller, and then rejourn the controversy of threepence to a second day of audience. When you are hearing a matter between party and party, if you chance to be pinched with the colic, you make faces like mummers, set up the bloody flag against all patience, and, in roaring for a chamber pot, dismiss the controversy bleeding, the more entangled by your hearing. All the peace you make in their cause is calling both the parties knaves. You are a pair of strange ones.
BRUTUS.
Come, come. You are well understood to be a perfecter giber for the table than a necessary bencher in the Capitol.
MENENIUS.
Our very priests must become mockers if they shall encounter such ridiculous subjects as you are. When you speak best unto the purpose, it is not worth the wagging of your beards, and your beards deserve not so honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher’s cushion or to be entombed in an ass’s packsaddle. Yet you must be saying Martius is proud, who, in a cheap estimation, is worth all your predecessors since Deucalion, though peradventure some of the best of ’em were hereditary hangmen. Good e’en to your Worships. More of your conversation would infect my brain, being the herdsmen of the beastly plebeians. I will be bold to take my leave of you.
[He begins to exit. Brutus and Sicinius stand aside.]
Enter Volumnia, Virgilia and Valeria
How now, my as fair as noble ladies—and the moon, were she earthly, no nobler—whither do you follow your eyes so fast?
VOLUMNIA.
Honourable Menenius, my boy Martius approaches. For the love of Juno, let’s go!
MENENIUS.
Ha? Martius coming home?
VOLUMNIA.
Ay, worthy Menenius, and with most prosperous approbation.