Coriolanus, Moses, and the Polygamist
Coriolanus is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays; I went to see the Tom Hiddleston production at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014. I’ve been a big fan of David Runciman for a long time. His COVID podcast series History of Ideas is genuinely masterful; if you want to start somewhere, the episode on Carl Schmitt will knock your socks off. Recently, he did an episode on Coriolanus; that’s the inspiration for this piece.
The play tells the story of Martius, Roman general in the early republic: as the people riot from hunger, Martius leads an army to defend Rome against their mortal enemies, the Volsci. Martius leads the Roman army right into the Volsci capital of Corioli, defeating their leader Aufidius and earning for himself the epithet Coriolanus.
Coriolanus is not a hero: he’s a butcher, a killing machine named for the god of war. Early in the play, he proposes a massacre to deal with the plebeian food riots:
MARTIUS
Would the nobility lay aside their ruth
And let me use my sword, I’d make a quarry
With thousands of these quartered slaves as high
As I could pick my lance.Act 1 Scene 1
During the battle in Corioli, he threatens to execute his retreating soldiers:
Enter the Army of the Volsces as through the city gates.
MARTIUS
They fear us not but issue forth their city.—
Now put your shields before your hearts, and fight
With hearts more proof than shields.—Advance, brave Titus.
They do disdain us much beyond our thoughts,
Which makes me sweat with wrath.—Come on, my fellows!
He that retires, I’ll take him for a Volsce,
And he shall feel mine edge.Alarum. The Romans are beat back to their trenches.
They exit, with the Volsces following.
Enter Martius cursing, with Roman soldiers.
MARTIUS
All the contagion of the south light on you,
You shames of Rome! You herd of—Boils and plagues
Plaster you o’er, that you may be abhorred
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile! You souls of geese,
That bear the shapes of men, how have you run
From slaves that apes would beat! Pluto and hell!
All hurt behind. Backs red, and faces pale
With flight and agued fear! Mend, and charge home,
Or, by the fires of heaven, I’ll leave the foe
And make my wars on you. Look to ’t. Come on!
If you’ll stand fast, we’ll beat them to their wives,
As they us to our trenches. Follow ’s!Act 1 Scene 4
So much for ‘cry God for Harry, England and St George’.
The interesting bit about Coriolanus, however, comes later. It’s pre-empted by this little exchange towards the end of Act 1 Scene 1:
SICINIUS Was ever man so proud as is this Martius?
BRUTUS He has no equal.
After his victory at Corioli, the Romans offer to make him consul. Coriolanus easily wins the support of the Senate, but refuses to pander to the masses.
MENENIUS
The Senate, Coriolanus, are well pleased
To make thee consul.CORIOLANUS
I do owe them still
My life and services.MENENIUS
It then remains
That you do speak to the people.CORIOLANUS
I do beseech you,
Let me o’erleap that custom, for I cannot
Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat them
For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage. Please you
That I may pass this doing.Act 2 Scene 2
Coriolanus is then persuaded to don the ‘gown of humility’ and meet the people. But faced with the unwashed masses, he can’t let go of his pride:
CORIOLANUS
Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here
To beg of Hob and Dick that does appear
Their needless vouches?Act 2 Scene 3
Here’s Runciman:
"He's too aloof to debase himself in any way, which means he is doomed. If he's going to fight a war for Rome and yet convey to the people of Rome that he has nothing but contempt for them, in the end they will reject him, and once rejected he has nowhere to go except to their enemies. And once he's in the hands of their enemies, he's an enemy of Rome, and that will be ruin, because his family are still in Rome. It's a tragedy."
Coriolanus doesn’t become consul; he’s banished for treachery, joins the Volsci, and ultimately has to choose between his family and his new comrades. Ultimately, Aufidius has him murdered.
This calls to mind another great, and deeply flawed, urban leader, one who rescued his city in its time of need, but maintained utter contempt for its populace. I’ve spoken about Robert Moses before on this blog, but Robert Caro’s epic biography The Power Broker is an extraordinary achievement.
Robert Moses acheived remarkable things as an urban planner in the 1920s and early 1930s, building highways and public parks in Long Island. One of his largest projects was the mighty Triborough Bridge, which connects Queens and the Bronx to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
These projects won him public adulation: fanned by the press, Moses lived up to his namesake. By aligning himself with parks, Moses played a political masterstroke: for who could possibly be against parks?
Moses had been deeply involved in New York politics throughout the 1920s, His mentor Al Smith had been the Democrat governor for eight years, but after Smith’s bitter enemy FDR won the nomination for 1929, Moses switched sides. In 1934, Moses ran on the Republican ticket for Governor of New York. Aided by Smith’s political machine, his popularity among the masses, and the wealthy upstate Republican caucus, Moses should have been a bipartisan shoo-in.
And yet Robert Moses didn’t win. Robert Moses, just like Coriolanus, was too proud to subject himself to the campaign trail. Robert Moses didn’t want to talk to the press, he didn’t want to give speeches, and he certainly didn’t want to kiss any babies. Here’s Caro:
“It wasn't what Moses said that most antagonized voters; it was how he said it. He let his contempt for the public show.
…
When he was introduced, his smiles as the audience applauded were brief and the look on his face was more one of barely concealed disdain than appreciation… As he read his text, he seldom bothered to look up, sometimes going five minutes without a single glance to acknowledge his listeners' presence. When the audience interrupted him with applause, he stepped back with a look that indicated nothing so much as boredom - and resumed reading as quickly as possible.
"He made no gestures, he did not vary the note of his voice," wrote one reporter.
"He gave no hint of oratory or of rhetorical periods. His only emphasis was a loudening of his voice to drive his points home."
"He gave the impression that he was way above them," recalls running mate McGoldrick.
"He was alienating them all the way through."
He looked like nothing so much as a man dining at a poor relation's home, feeling strongly that it was an act of great condescension and kindness on his part to be there and determined to let all the people present know he felt that way.”
As a result, Moses lost in a landslide - he gained 37% of the vote, compared to 58% for the Democrat Herbert Lehman (son of one of the eponymous Lehman Brothers). It was an absolute embarassment.
Moses was a world-class political operator in both Albany and New York City; so why was he a bad campaigner? Why was Moses such an idiot? Why didn’t he do the necessary things to achieve his goal? I suppose one answer could be that he didn’t really want to become consul (sorry, Governor) after all; and his failure on the campaign trail was deliberate. But that’s hard to square with his extraordinary effectiveness - which would continue for decades to come - elsewhere. Maybe Moses was less effective once he was on the ballot, rather than the unassailable cause of parks.
Caro points to a different explanation: Moses’ character.
“His arrogance was emotional, visceral, a driving force created by heredity and hardened by living, a force too strong to be tamed by intellect, a force that drove him to do things for which there is no wholly rational explanation. It wasn't just that Robert Moses didn't want to listen to the public. It was that he couldn't listen, couldn't - even for the sake of the power he coveted - try to make people feel that he understood and sympathized with them.
And there was something else behind Robert Moses' arrogance, a strange, flickering shadow. For not only could Robert Moses not help showing his contempt for others, he seemed actually to take pleasure in showing this contempt - a deep, genuine pleasure, a pleasure whose intensity leads to the suspicion that, in a way, he needed to display his superiority, with a need so great that he simply could not dissemble it. How else to explain the fact that, even when he was appearing before the public to ask for its support, he could not help ostentatiously flaunting condescension and boredom - boredom even at its applause?”
At the end of the play, Aufidius considers the figure of Coriolanus. Will he now betray the Volsci to save his family? And why was he banished from Rome in the first place? Pride, of course, is the simple answer; but Aufidius thinks it goes deeper than that:
Whether ’twas pride,
Which out of daily fortune ever taints
The happy man; whether defect of judgment,
To fail in the disposing of those chances
Which he was lord of; or whether nature,
Not to be other than one thing, not moving
From th’ casque to th’ cushion, but commanding peace
Even with the same austerity and garb
As he controlled the war;Act 4 Scene 7
So Coriolanus made three mistakes: he was too proud; he lacked political judgement; but above all, he failed to adapt himself to his circumstances. He conducted himself in peace as he did in war. It reminds me of the Duke of Wellington, who, after his first Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister, wrote in his diary: “An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders, and they wanted to stay and discuss them.”
But this is a tragedy; and part of the point of tragedy is that the seeds are sown right from the start. Destruction is ineluctable. And Aufidius, the Joker to Coriolanus’ Batman, respects his adversary. Even though Coriolanus was banished from Rome,
He has a merit
To choke it in the utt’rance. So our virtues
Lie in th’ interpretation of the time,
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
T’ extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail;
Rights by rights falter; strengths by strengths do fail.Act 4 Scene 7
Coriolanus’s strengths as a soldier, as a killing machine, destroyed him. Coriolanus couldn’t just beg of Hob and Dick, because Coriolanus would never do that. If this sounds circular, it is. That’s tragedy, that’s how these myths work; hubris and nemesis. Strengths by strengths do fail.
This might say more about me than Moses, but I think he’s a sympathetic character. His achievements are extraordinary - I want him to win. But Caro ultimately came to see him as a monster - and Moses does have glaring flaws. Here are three:
He refuses to build any public transport: bridges are too low for buses, and trains are non grata. As a result, only the middle class can access his new Long Island parks.
He destroyed his brother’s Paul’s life, blackballing him from an engineering job in the city government, and refusing to cede control trust fund to which Paul was entitled.
He was gratuitously racist. He kept the pools in black neighbourhoods bitingly cool, and built fewer of them. He rebuilt the Riverside Park, which runs four miles, from 72nd to 125th Street, and yet:
“There was a little detail on the playhouse-comfort station in the Harlem section of Riverside Park that is found nowhere else in the park. The wrought-iron trellises of the park's other playhouses and comfort stations are decorated with designs like curling waves.
The wrought-iron trellises of the Harlem playhouse-comfort station are decorated with monkeys.”
This stuff is extraordinary to me. Set alongside his immense achievements, his petty cruelty is almost incomprehensible - it’s bathetic. Could he just, like, have been less of a dick? Why does someone who achieves superhuman feats elsewhere have to let himself down?
But I think it’s cheating to wish he were less of a dick. That’s like saying to Elon Musk, couldn’t you just calm down with the memes? Or next time a cave diver sets out on a rescue mission, maybe hold your tongue? Couldn’t Coriolanus just have suffered to wear his woolvish toge?
Here’s a remarkable line from the first daughter of H.L. Hunt, the mighty Texas oil billionaire. Her mother was Hunt’s first wife; but Hunt didn’t get divorced. Instead, he had three separate wives, each (originally) in secret, and fathered children with each one. I’ll repeat that: this is a daughter confronted with unholy unfaithfulness, treacherous three-timing, and the viciously-rumoured social death of her mother - and she still makes this concession:
"You can't hold it against a man for possessing and being possessed by all the component and conflicting parts of being a genius. It's just that sometimes it is difficult for mortals to live with."
Margaret Hunt Hill, quoted in The Big Rich, p.52
All the component and conflicting parts of being a genius; that’s Coriolanus, Moses, and Hunt too.
One fire drives out one fire, one nail one nail;
Rights by rights falter; strengths by strengths do fail.