This book's extended foray into Shakespeare's fugitive politics continues with an uncomfortable admission. The figure that it most associates with a politics of dissensus is, in fact, one of Shakespeare's most reluctant politicians. Caius Martius, renamed Coriolanus after his punishing defeat of the Volscian army at Corioles, refuses politics, opting for war as his contribution to the Roman state. His unwillingness to participate in the republican body politic depicted famously in the belly metaphor in the play's first act signals Coriolanus's rejection of politics, if by politics we mean the process of coordinating differences into broad consensus – a value of the Roman republican tradition. If Roman politics requires representing factional desires as common interests, Coriolanus explicitly rejects this model of politics because he understands its threatening potential. A politics of representation built on common interests and coordination ‘will in time’, according to Coriolanus, ‘[w]in upon power and throw forth greater themes / For insurrection's arguing’ (1.1.210–12). As a Roman leader content to police the plebeians rather than acknowledge that their world intrudes on the sensible world of Roman republican politics, Coriolanus's political aspirations in republican Rome seem suspect, to say the least. His inability to perform the ritual of humility that would secure his position of political power and his forced departure from the city to seek a world elsewhere confirm the citizen's condemnation of Coriolanus as the declared ‘chief enemy / to the people’ (1.1.6–7). Aristotle would be disappointed; a political animal Coriolanus is not.

This chapter proposes to take seriously the citizen's condemnation of Coriolanus that dismisses him as the ‘enemy to the people’. In privileging friendship over enmity as its foundation for a political community, the citizen endorses a politics predicated on consensus, fraternity and affiliation; enmity, in other words, is banished along with Coriolanus as a threat to the proper practice of politics in Rome.