In Book 7 of his great history of Rome, from her foundation to the time of Augustus, Titus Livius recounts, with a certain admixture of scepticism, the story of Marcus Curtius. In the year 362 bc, a chasm suddenly opened in the middle of the Forum. The soothsayers, when consulted, declared that only a ritual sacrifice of the thing ‘wherein the most puissance and greatnes of the people of Rome consisted’ could close the fissure and ‘make the state of Rome to remain sure forever’. Much discussion followed, but no one could determine what that precious thing might be. Then Marcus Curtius, described in Philemon Holland's Elizabethan translation of Livy as ‘a right hardie knight and martiall yong gentleman’, ‘rebuked them therefore, because they doubted whether the Romanes had any earthly thing better than armour and valor’. Armed at all points, he mounted a horse ‘as richly trapped and set out as possible he could devise’, and – like Hotspur at Shrewsbury – ‘leapt into destruction’ (2 Henry IV 1.3.33). The gulf closed.

In the Rome of Marcus Curtius, a century after the time of Coriolanus, it is by no means obvious that valour is ‘the chiefest virtue’, the one to which the city still owes her greatness. Times have changed. The Romans need to be reminded, by the gods and by the heroic action of one ‘martiall yong gentleman’, that formerly, as Plutarch asserts in his ‘Life of Coriolanus’, ‘valliantnes was honoured in Rome above all other vertues: which they called Virtus, by the name of vertue selfe, as including in the generall name, all other speciall vertues besides.