While Menenius attempts to placate the angry Roman crowds with his parable of the belly, which emphasizes the necessity of cooperation among classes, Coriolanus arrives, and his harsh language throws fuel on the fire of the conflict. Addressing the Roman citizens, Coriolanus refuses to moderate his position, and he harshly satirizes the plebeian class:
What would you have, you curs,
That like nor peace nor war? The one affrights you;
The other makes you proud. He that trusts to you,
Where he should find you lions, finds you hares;
Where foxes, geese. You are no surer, no
Than is the coal of fire upon the ice
Or hailstone in the sun. Your virtue is
To make him worthy whose offense subdues him,
And curse that justice did it. Who deserves greatness
Deserves your hate; and your affections are
A sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
Which would increase his evil.
Coriolanus gives voice to the patrician’s contempt for the working class plebeians who constitute the majority of the population in Ancient Rome. First, he suggests that they are cowards who are too afraid to enlist in Rome’s army but nevertheless are boastful during times of peace, when their courage cannot be tested. Next, he suggests that the masses have no real convictions, but instead, change their mind constantly in response to their current needs, just as ice melts in the presence of heat. Coriolanus’s satirical and condescending invective fans the flames of the class conflicts central to the play.
After the battle between the Volscians and Romans, Menenius approaches Brutus and Sicinius, the two tribunes of the plebeians, who represent their interests in Roman politics. Menenius mocks them in a speech that satirizes the poor from an elitist perspective:
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.
He dismisses them as minor and insignificant figures whose legal powers extend only to judging small, unimportant concerns. The tribunes of the plebeians, he argues, spend a whole afternoon listening to a dispute between the wife of an orange vendor and the wife of a faucet seller over a very small amount of money. Further, Menenius suggests that they suspend the proceedings when they suffer from indigestion or other stomach problems, running for the bathroom and dismissing the plaintiffs. Menenius’s mocking satire implies that the plebeians’ lives are petty and that their concerns are unworthy of legal attention or political representation.
