Plutarch, a Greek writer in the early Roman Empire, composed Parallel Lives: short biographies that pair a famous Greek with a famous Roman. This one is Coriolanus, matched with Alcibiades, another gifted soldier his own city could not keep.

Gaius Marcius captured Corioli, a town of the Volsci — a people of central Italy, south of Rome — and came home as Coriolanus, too proud for the consulship, one of two officials elected to run Rome for a year. The people's tribunes, who spoke for ordinary citizens, banished him. He walked into the enemy camp and sat at Tullus Aufidius's table. The Volscian army reached the ditch outside Rome. His mother Veturia and his wife Volumnia came out with the children; he yielded to her voice and lost the war he had already won. Aufidius had him killed. Shakespeare later took the story whole.