William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Coriolanus

ACT II. 1. SCENE I. Rome. A public place (continued)

BRUTUS.
We do it not alone, sir.

MENENIUS.
I know you can do very little alone; for your helps are many, or
else your actions would grow wondrous single: your abilities are
too infant-like for doing much alone. You talk of pride: O that
you could turn your eyes toward the napes of your necks, and make
but an interior survey of your good selves! O that you could!

BOTH TRIBUNES.
What then, sir?

MENENIUS.
Why, then you should discover a brace of unmeriting, proud,
violent, testy magistrates,--alias fools,--as any in Rome.

SICINIUS.
Menenius, you are known well enough too.

MENENIUS.
I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup
of hot wine with not a drop of allaying Tiber in't; said to
be something imperfect in favouring the first complaint, hasty
and tinder-like upon too trivial motion; one that converses more
with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the
morning. What I think I utter, and spend my malice in my breath.
Meeting two such wealsmen as you are,--I cannot call you
Lycurguses,--if the drink you give me touch my palate adversely,
I make a crooked face at it. I cannot say your worships have
delivered the matter well when I find the ass in compound with
the major part of your syllables; and though I must be content to
bear with those that say you are reverend grave men, yet they lie
deadly that tell you have good faces. If you see this in the map
of my microcosm, follows it that I am known well enough too? What
harm can your bisson conspectuities glean out of this character,
if I be known well enough too?

BRUTUS.
Come, sir, come, we know you well enough.

MENENIUS.
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
fosset-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: all
the peace you make in their cause is calling both the parties
knaves. You are a pair of strange ones.