The Citizens of Rome are perhaps the most powerful and most powerless force in the play. They appear first as desperate, starving masses demanding grain from the patricians, armed with clubs and righteous anger at their own deprivation. Yet within moments of Menenius’s belly fable, their resolve crumbles. They are creatures of appetite and fear, swayed by eloquence they do not fully understand, capable of passionate conviction one moment and complete reversal the next. The play tracks their arc from revolutionary fervor to reluctant obedience to ecstatic celebration and back again, never once asking what they actually want beyond the moment’s persuasive speaker.
The tribunes Sicinius and Brutus understand the people’s nature perfectly: they are a herd requiring a shepherd, a tongue requiring a voice. When Coriolanus is elected consul, the citizens vote enthusiastically, though many admit afterward they were forced by fear and tradition into compliance. Yet when the tribunes orchestrate a reversal, calling Coriolanus “traitor” and “enemy,” the same voices cry for his blood with equal fervor. The people become instruments of power rather than its wielders, even as they believe themselves sovereign. They blame themselves for the banishment afterward—“we did for the best,” they murmur—revealing an awareness of their own manipulability that brings them no wisdom or protection.
Only Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother, understands what the people truly represent: not political agency but emotional force. When she leads the women and children to his tent as suppliants, she speaks not to their reason or justice but to the human heart that even a god-like warrior possesses. The final scenes reveal that the people’s greatest power lies not in their voices or their violence but in their capacity to move men toward mercy. After Coriolanus agrees to spare Rome, the same citizens who banished him moments before line the streets to welcome him as a savior. Their triumph is real, though they understand neither its cost nor its cause. In Coriolanus, the people are both the measure of Rome’s greatness and the instrument of its potential destruction—a force mighty yet utterly dependent on those clever or passionate enough to direct their will.
