The play opens with an angry mob, as the Roman plebeians attempt to force their way into the Roman grain storehouses in response to widespread hunger and famine in the city. The First Citizen, a Roman “everyman” character, uses a metaphor to articulate the complaints of the plebeians against Rome’s ruling class:
If they would wield us but the superfluity
while it were wholesome, we might guess they
relieved us humanely. But they think we are too
dear. The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our
misery, is as an inventory to particularize their
abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them. Let
us revenge this with our pikes ere we become
rakes; for the gods know I speak this in hunger for
bread, not in thirst for revenge.
The First Citizen argues that the plebeians are not greedy—rather, they simply request the “superfluity” or excess of grain that the ruling class will not eat and which will otherwise spoil and be of no use to anyone. However, he notes bitterly, the minimal needs of the plebeians are considered too “dear” (that is, expensive) for the wealthy patricians to supply. He then uses a metaphor in which the plebeians' hunger and resulting thinness becomes “an inventory” to the patricians. In other words, the First Citizen imagines that the wealthy think of the “need” or “lack” of the plebeians as a material thing that they can hoard, just as they hoard wealth and food.
