Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 27, 2025
In the same year died Agrippa Menenius, a man all his life equally a favourite with senators and commons, endeared still more to the commons after the secession. This man, the mediator and impartial promoter of harmony among his countrymen, the ambassador of the senators to the commons, the man who brought back the commons to the city, did not leave enough to bury him publicly.
'Not of a woman's tenderness to be, Requires nor child, nor woman's face to see. I have sat too long. But the mother will not let him go, and her stormy eloquence completes the conquest which that dumb rhetoric had before well nigh achieved. Yes, Menenius was right in his induction. His abstraction and brief summing up of 'this Volumnia' and her history, is the true one.
Menenius Agrippa, their chief spokesman, after much entreaty to the people, concluded, at length, with this celebrated fable: "It once happened, that all the other members of a man mutinied against the stomach, which they accused as the only idle, uncontributing part in the whole body, while the rest were put to hardships and the expense of much labor to minister to its appetites.
I ask you, when Marius lately, after he had stabbed Hellas, threw himself down a precipice, was he raving mad? Or will you absolve the man from the imputation of a disturbed mind, and condemn him for the crime, according to your custom, imposing, on things named that have an affinity in signification? This crowd too Chrysippus places in the fruitful family of Menenius.
If he stir, if he have reference to the patricians, if he should think for a moment that there existed any other party in the state but the commons, let him place before his eyes the banishment of Caius Marcius, the condemnation and death of Menenius."
Dennis is offended, that Menenius, a senator of Rome, should play the buffoon; and Voltaire perhaps thinks decency violated when the Danish Usurper is represented as a drunkard. But Shakespeare always makes nature predominate over accident; and if he preserves the essential character, is not very careful of distinctions superinduced and adventitious.
When Menenius related to the people his fable of the limbs and the stomach, if any one had remarked to this story-teller that the stomach freely gives to the limbs the nourishment which it freely receives, but that the patricians gave to the plebeians only for cash, and lent to them only at usury, he undoubtedly would have silenced the wily senator, and saved the people from a great imposition.
and that idea the idea of the diseased commonwealth, which Menenius has already set forth that notion of parts and partiality, and dissonance and dissolution, which is a radical idea in the play, and runs into its minutest points of phraseology, breaks out at once in his rough speech. Men. Hail, noble Marcius! Mar. Thanks.
This vast history, to be for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer of Coriolanus, depict him.
The spokesman of this embassy was Menenius Agrippa, who, after begging the plebeians to come to terms, and pleading the cause of the Senate with them, wound up his speech by the following fable: Once upon a time, said he, all the members revolted against the belly, reproaching it with lying idle in the body, and making all the other members work in order to provide it with food; but the belly laughed them to scorn, saying that it was quite true that it took all the food which the body obtained, but that it afterwards distributed it among all the members.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking