The First Citizen opens the play as the voice of Rome’s starving plebeians, a man consumed by hunger and anger at the patrician class that hoards grain while the common people suffer. He speaks for the mob’s rage, articulating their grievance against Caius Marcius with particular venom—this “chief enemy to the people” who has called them scabs and rogues while they perish. Yet even in his fury, the First Citizen reveals the complexity Shakespeare sees in popular judgment. When the Second Citizen questions whether they have the right to deny Marcius the consulship, the First Citizen wavers, admitting that the general has fought bravely, though his pride poisons his service. This small moment of fairness shows a man capable of reason, even as his class’s desperation drives him toward violence.
As the play progresses, the First Citizen becomes the instrument of the tribunes’ manipulation. Sicinius and Brutus stoke his resentment, remind him of past slights, and guide his vote—or rather, guide the votes he represents. He participates in demanding Marcius’s exile, shouting with the crowd that the general is a traitor. But Shakespeare gives him no soliloquies of conviction; his words are always reactive, always choral. He is moved by eloquence and spectacle, swayed by whoever speaks last and loudest. By the final act, when news comes that Marcius has turned his army against Rome, the First Citizen appears among those who admit their terrible mistake. He confesses that when he cried “Banish him,” he said it was a pity—a small redemptive moment that suggests even the mob can recognize its own blindness.
The First Citizen embodies Shakespeare’s deeply ambivalent view of democracy and popular power. He is neither villain nor hero, but a hungry man caught in forces larger than himself: his own need for bread, his justifiable rage at patrician contempt, and his dangerous susceptibility to manipulation by those who claim to represent him. His few lines carry the weight of the play’s central collision—between a man who cannot bend and a people who can do nothing but bend, depending on whichever leader last caught their ear. In him, the play finds the tragedy not of one noble man destroyed, but of a whole city unmade by its own inability to judge wisely.
What is the city but the people?
What is the city if not the people?
First Citizen · Act 3, Scene 1
Sicinius speaks this line as he incites the crowd to turn against Coriolanus after a violent confrontation. The question cuts to the heart of the play's central conflict: whether a state belongs to its military hero or its people. It is memorable because it sounds simple but contains an entire political philosophy that justifies the tribunes' actions and sets the stage for Coriolanus's downfall.
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize As the dead carcasses of unburied men That do corrupt my air
You common pack of dogs! I hate your breath As much as the smell of the rotten swamps, whose love I value As much as the dead bodies of men left unburied That pollute my air
First Citizen · Act 3, Scene 3
Coriolanus unleashes his contempt for the people at the moment of his final banishment, letting his true feelings pour out without restraint. The imagery is violent and unforgettable: the people are not human to him, their love is filth. This is the line that proves the tribunes and the people correct: he truly does despise them, and his contempt is the force that destroys him.
