Louis XIV held the center by giving nothing away. Coriolanus lost the political field by giving everything away — and he did it himself. Greene presents Coriolanus as a brilliant Roman military leader and a disastrous politician, and the contrast between those two roles is the point. On the battlefield, Coriolanus was decisive, feared, effective. In the political arena, he was undone by his own mouth. When he sought the consulship, Roman custom required him to speak humbly to the citizens, to ask for their votes, to perform a kind of public deference. He could not do it. Instead, he spoke at length and with contempt, making his disdain for the common people audible to everyone in the room, including the people who were waiting for exactly that. The tribunes Brutus and Sicinius did not need to defeat him directly. Greene's account makes this clear: they recognized that his volatile speech was a weapon he was handing them. So they provoked him in public. They knew what would happen. Coriolanus ranted. He insulted the populace. He confirmed every suspicion his enemies had been quietly circulating. And then he was exiled. Not because a clever rival outmaneuvered him. Because he exposed himself. Like when a general wins every battle in the field and then walks into a negotiation and announces exactly what he cannot afford to lose — the enemy does not need to be brilliant. They just need to listen. Greene's argument here is precise. Every extra word is a data point. Every data point narrows what others have to imagine about you. And the moment your opponents stop imagining and start knowing, they have something to work with. Coriolanus gave Brutus and Sicinius not just a grievance to exploit but a performance to replay — a public record of his contempt that could be used to turn the crowd against him. The speech was the weapon. He supplied it. Greene is not prescribing muteness. The discipline is narrower than that: control over the moment when the useful words have been said and the dangerous ones are still coming. Louis XIV stopped before that moment. Coriolanus never found it. Now, Greene does acknowledge a reversal. There are narrow cases, he argues, where speaking more is tactically useful — when the goal is to confuse, to overwhelm, to flood an opponent with information and watch them lose the thread. But he treats these as exceptions. The default posture of power, in his account, is economy. The person who controls how much they reveal controls the terms of the interaction. Words are currency. Spend too many and each one loses weight. Remember, this is Greene's framework, not a claim that silence wins every room. The law is a warning about a specific failure mode: the moment when emotion, ego, or the need to be understood overrides the strategic judgment to stop. Coriolanus had the talent. He had the record. What he could not do was hold the center when it mattered most. Every signal he sent in those moments became part of how Rome remembered him. That accumulated memory — what people carry about you before you enter the room — is where Greene turns next.