These are some questions and observations whittled down and altered from my full commentary on Julius Caesar. They may prove useful for participating in class discussion. If you want to view the full questions and commentary set, just follow the relevant links in the sitewide menu bar above.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. (The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 288-343.)
Act 1, Scene 1 (289-90, The Roman people are celebrating the dictator Julius Caesar’s triumph over his slain rival Pompey’s sons at Munda, Spain; the Tribunes Murellus and Flavius scold the plebeians for celebrating Caesar’s victory when they had once rejoiced at Pompey’s triumphant processions through Rome; the people decamp, and the two Tribunes strip the nearby statues of Caesar of the crowns with which his adherents had decked them.)
The play’s action begins during the Feast of Lupercalia in 45 BCE. [1] This vibrant holiday involves sacrifices, feasting, and a ritual whereby male runners lightly whip female bystanders on their wrists with a cord. It is a fertility ritual, a prayer for Roman society’s perpetuation. [2]
During the Lupercalia, the ordinary laws are tacitly suspended, and in Shakespeare’s play, the common people, who “make holiday to see Caesar” (1.1.), flaunt their temporary idleness. A cobbler,[3] when grilled by Flavius, jests, “Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me. Yet if / you be out, sir, I can mend you” (289, 1.1.16-17). The Tribune Flavius considers this disrespectful.
No doubt both Tribunes [4] believe commoners should know their places, holiday or not. Flavius and Murellus are annoyed not about the Lupercal Feast itself, but rather about the triumph granted to Caesar over the killing of Pompey’s sons at Munda, Spain. [5] Flavius and Murellus clearly favored the Pompeian faction in the now defunct First Triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. [6]
The Tribunes seem certain that their own words and gestures—mainly, removing the “crowns” placed upon Caesar’s statues by his adherents—will set things right. Caesar had already violated Roman precedent in January of 49 BCE by crossing the Rubicon River and entering Italy with his army. Now, having started a civil war in Italy and situated himself as Rome’s dictator, [7] he constitutes a grave threat.
The problem isn’t just with Caesar. How much difference was there, really, between the three illustrious men (Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus) who formed the First Triumvirate in 60 BCE? Indeed, Rome had long been beset by powerful factions led by the likes of the autocratic Sulla and the populist Marius. These rulers were not unconflicted republicans; they were “strongmen,” and their supremacy led to bloodletting and mass proscriptions. See [8] and. [9]
Murellus himself points out to the commoners that they once adored Pompey: “Many a time and oft / Have you climbed up to walls and battlements, / … / … and there have sat / The livelong day with patient expectation / To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome” (289-90, 1.1.36-41). [10]
The Roman republic had been in trouble for many decades by the time of the setting of Shakespeare’s play. That historical fact should influence how we interpret the true status of Julius Caesar and the subsequent decisions and actions of the conspirators Marcus Brutus, [11] Gaius Cassius, [12] and their confederates.
The scene ends with Flavius telling Murellus: “These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing / Will make him fly an ordinary pitch, / Who else would soar above the view of men / And keep us all in servile fearfulness” (290, 1.1.71-74). Flavius is mistaken: Caesar will never“fly an ordinary pitch.”
Act 1, Scene 2 (290-97, Antony is instructed by Caesar to attend especially to Calphurnia during the Lupercal’s fertility rites; a soothsayer warns Caesar that the Ides of March will be dangerous for him, but Caesar rebuffs him; Cassius begins to work upon Brutus about the need to check Caesar’s pretensions to kingship; Casca fills both men in on the “theater” whereby Antony mock-offered Caesar a crown three times; Brutus promises to speak further with Cassius; alone, Cassius expresses surprise at how receptive Brutus already is to his incitement, and is determined to pursue his advantage with all speed.)
Upon first view, Caesar seems a grand figure, casually ordering great men around. Still, what Caesar says to Antony during his Lupercal procession reminds us that his wife, Calpurnia, is unable to have children. Julius is human; alone in an admiring, obliging crowd, he depends upon Antony’s guidance and friendship.
Caesar seems to credit the fertility-based supernatural underpinnings of the Lupercal Festival, but what is probably a combination of vanity and the genuine fearlessness of an old military man, he will not listen to a soothsayer’s plea to “Beware the Ides of March” (291, 1.2.23), and calls him “a dreamer” (291, 1.2.24).
Brutus and Cassius remain aloof from the procession, and their initial conversation turns upon self-awareness tied together with the key Roman concept of honor.
Cassius asks Brutus if he can see himself through the eyes of others. The reply Brutus gives reminds us how difficult it is for a person to be self-reflective: Brutus says, “the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (292, 1.2.52-53). This honorable Roman has been thinking much the same as Cassius, though in a nobler strain. He would not have Caesar become a king.
Cassius is not shy: he both resents and envies Caesar, and holds him in contempt even as he marvels at the man’s success. Recounting a time when Caesar challenged him to a swim in the choppy waters of the Tiber, Cassius refers to Virgil’s Aeneid, putting himself in place of Aeneas and casting Caesar as the hero’s enfeebled father Anchises, who had to be carried from the burning, defeated Troy. [13] Cassius says with disdain, “so from the waves of Tiber / Did I the tired Caesar; and this man / Is now become a god …” (293, 1.2.114-16).
Cassius seeks not justice but an opportunity to take power himself, at least vicariously through Brutus. He also sees a disjunction between what ordinary people think Caesar is and what he actually is to those who know him. In this, he seems correct: Caesar’s image with the public is not who he really is.
We like to think of the Romans as upstanding and ancient times as simpler and more noble, but Roman political culture was at least as sophisticated as ours. “Spin” would hardly have been foreign to Roman politicians. Cassius tries to stir resentment in the breast of Brutus, so he connects him to his illustrious ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, who helped drive out the last Tarquin King from Rome. [14]
Brutus is naïve concerning his friend’s motives. He will, he tells Cassius in a passage full of dramatic irony, find an appropriate time “to hear and answer such high things” (294, 1.2.170). Cassius’s motives are nowhere near upright. Brutus, ever the idealist, transforms everyone around him into something purer than they really are.
As the holiday procession continues, Caesar speaks to Antony again, and makes it clear that he does not trust Cassius, finding him prideful. It is also obvious that Caesar surrounds himself with people willing to tell him what he wants to hear.
A quip often attributed to Alice Roosevelt Longworth goes something like, “If you have nothing good to say about anyone, sit right here next to me.” [15] Well, Caesar the great favorite of Lady Fortune would agree. He criticizes the “lean and hungry look” of Cassius (294, 1.2.194) and then invites Antony to tell him the latest gossip about the man: “Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf, / And tell me truly what thou think’s of him” (295, 1.2.13-14).
This lover of gossip has just finished declaring himself utterly fearless, saying, “I rather tell thee what is to be feared / Than what I fear; for always I am Caesar” (295, 1.2.211-12). There is an “always on” quality to Caesar that seems in line with Casca’s comments about the great man’s street theater in the presence of the common people, with a “best supporting actor” assist from Antony.
Casca tells Cassius and Brutus that in this theatrical interlude, Antony offered Caesar a crown three times, and each time Caesar refused it, each time a little more reluctantly. After the third refusal, the crowd became agitated and caused Caesar to have an epileptic fit: Casca describes the scene as follows: “He fell down in the marketplace, and foamed at mouth, / and was speechless” (296, 1.2.249-50).
Casca is scornful of the common people because they would gladly make Caesar king. The “tag-rag” crowd seems like an ordinary Elizabethan rabble. They follow their own appetites and are greedy for emotional spectacle. It is easy to see the implications of Shakespeare’s representation of Rome’s plebeians: if these people must ultimately render Rome worthy of its freedom, the Eternal City is in trouble.
Cassius draws the lesson: it isn’t Caesar who is sick, it’s everyone else: he tells Brutus and Casca, “Caesar hath it not, but you and I, / And honest Casca, we have the falling sickness” (296, 1.2.252-53). There’s also chilling news from Casca, who says that the Tribunes Murellus and Flavius have been thrown out of office for stripping the crowns from Caesar’s statues. (296, 1.2.278-79)
At the end of the second scene, Cassius, alone, clarifies for us how he plans to win Brutus to a conspiracy to kill Caesar. The plan is to manipulate Brutus still more intensively by taking advantage of his honesty, patriotism, and great stature among Romans as a descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus.
Cassius is surprised at how much progress he has made, but there’s work to be done, so he says, “I will this night / In several hands in at his windows throw … / Writings, all tending to the great opinion / That Rome holds of his name …” (297, 1.2.308-09, 311-12). Brutus won’t be able to resist the call of his fellow citizens.
Act 1, Scene 3 (297-300, Casca encounters Cicero and shares with him the strange sights he’s seen in Rome’s streets, which he—though not Cicero—considers portents; Cassius convinces Casca to sign on to the plot to kill Caesar before he accepts kingly status; Cinna also joins the conspiracy, and Cassius dispatches him to place some letters in spots where Brutus will discover them and take the hint that the people want him to act.)
Cicero proves unwilling to buy into breathless talk about prodigies and omens. He believes it’s all a matter of interpretation; as he says, “men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (298, 1.3.34-35). Casca fears the omens, but Cassius is more aggressive in his interpretation.
Caesar is, says Cassius, “no mightier than thyself or me / In personal action, yet prodigious grown, / And fearful, as these strange eruptions are” (299, 1.3.76-78). A Roman confronts fears, and if captivity looms, the Stoics offer a remedy: “That part of tyranny that I do bear / I can shake off at pleasure” (299, 1.3.99-100). [16]
Cassius thinks Caesar’s greatness is a mark of the people’s degeneracy. This betrays the conspiracy’s weakness: if Cassius’s contemporaries are merely “we the sheeple,” how can they maintain the ancient republic, even if an assassination creates an chance to restore it? If the sheeple are fit only to be led, the argument is over who will dominate them.
As Thomas Carlyle will later write, “In the long run, every government is the exact symbol of its people.” [17] Perhaps democracies die when the citizenry are no longer worthy of such noble experiments. This is not to say that Shakespeare or his audience were sympathetic to republican arguments—monarchy was considered the best form of government. Or perhaps, as Winston Churchill said of democracy, “the worst form of government except for all those other forms of government.”
When Cinna arrives, Cassius gives him several letters and tells him to place them where Brutus is sure to find them and suppose that the people desire him to act
Cassius’s rhetoric convinces Casca to join up. He and Cassius want to borrow Brutus’s connection to Roman heroism, thinking it will render their own deeds noble. As Casca says, “that which would appear offense in us, / His countenance, like richest alchemy, / Will change to virtue and to worthiness” (300, 1.3.158-60).
Act 2, Scene 1 (301-08, Brutus reflects earnestly on whether to join Cassius’s conspiracy; it takes only one of Cassius’s letters to win his consent; when the conspirators visit his home, he joins the group but chastises them for wanting to swear an oath and for favoring the murder of Mark Antony in addition to Caesar; Brutus tells his fellow conspirators they must not act like “butchers”; Brutus’s wife Portia asks him to explain what’s going on, but they are interrupted; Brutus leaves with Caius Ligarius to pay Caesar a visit.)
Brutus, in his ruminations, says that he would act only for the general good, not because he bears any grudge against Caesar, who knows how to subordinate passion to reason. [18] This man, a mentor no less, has not yet given the offense that would justify killing him.
Brutus’s main argument is abstract, and sounds like Acton’s Law: absolute power would corrupt his friend, so it is necessary to extrapolate what that friend might do if given absolute power. A would-be king is a serpent who must be dealt with as such: we must “think him as a serpent’s egg / Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, / And kill him in the shell” (301, 2.1.32-34). [19]
The very existence of the Republic is at stake—a political entity that was founded by Brutus’s ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus. [20] Even so, it is difficult to swallow a plan to murder a man on the idea that “It is the bright day that brings forth the adder” (301, 2.1.14). Brutus’s argument, grounded in assumptions and adages, is near “slippery slope” status. It is similar to some sci-fi police authority planning preemptive action against “future crime.” [21]
In Brutus’s time, Rome confronts a return of kings, this time in the person of a Roman. The letter Brutus reads—written and planted by Cassius—mentions this glorious ancestry, and it seems as if the letter only (to adapt a line from Macbeth [22]) “marshalls Brutus the way that he was going.” He is very taken with the heroic past connected to his family name—it’s vital to his identity. “O Rome,” he declares, “I make thee promise, / If the redress will follow, thou receivest / Thy full petition at the hand of Brutus” (302, 2.1.56-58).
All the same, participating in a conspiracy has begun to exact a toll upon Brutus. As he describes what he is experiencing, “Between the acting of a dreadful thing / And the first motion, all the interim is / like a phantasma or a hideous dream …” (302, 2.1.63-65). [23] He has not been able to sleep since Cassius began his suit. [24]
When Brutus is introduced to the conspirators, he is at first taken aback by the men’s disguises—their secretive appearance sorts ill with this great patrician’s bearing. When Casca expresses a wish to “swear our resolution” (303, 2.1.312), Brutus finds it necessary to explain how un-Roman it is to require an oath: “What need we any spur but our own cause / To prick us to redress?” (303, 2.1.122-23).
It’s decided that the conspirators should not try to recruit Cicero, for, says Brutus, “he will never follow anything / That other men begin” (304, 2.1.150-51).
Brutus also tries to limit the bloodiness of the conspirators’ intent. Decius asks if anyone besides Caesar should be cut down, and Cassius pipes up with the name “Mark Antony.” His logic for taking out Caesar’s favorite is impeccable, but Brutus will have none of it. “Our course will seem too bloody,” he tells Cassius, “To cut the head off and then hack the limbs, / Like wrath in death and envy afterwards …” (304, 2.1.162-64).
Sparing Antony will turn out to be a mistake, but it shows Brutus’s nobility. It’s possible to attribute to Brutus some degree of less than high-minded strategizing when he says that Antony “can do no more than Caesar’s arm / When Caesar’s head is off” (305, 2.1.182-83), but that would be ungenerous.
Brutus seems naïve throughout this scene, saying of Caesar, “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods, / Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds” (304, 2.1.173-74). How is that possible? The thought sounds delusional. Even if the act is a sacrifice and not butchery, Caesar “must bleed for it” (304, 2.1.171), as Brutus admits.
Brutus is most comfortable with philosophical abstractions, not action. The conspirators are “butchers,” whatever their intentions. Brutus’s noble words do not show any recognition of the impending deed’s full horror.
Cassius worries that Caesar, who has grown superstitious with age and isolation, might be unwilling to come to the Capitol. But Decius allays that fear, telling the conspirators that flattery will do the trick: “when I tell him he hates flatterers, / He says he does, being then most flattered. / Let me work …” (305, 2.1.207-09). The Man of Destiny has become an easy mark for those who know his flaws.
Portia shows herself to be the only character who really understands Brutus, with the possible exception of Octavius, who treats him as a worthy opponent. (306-07, 2.1.233-302). She requests insistently that Brutus let her in on what is troubling him: “Dwell I but in the suburbs / Of your good pleasure?” she asks, and continues, “If it be no more, / Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife” (307, 2.1.285-87).
In speaking to Caius Ligarius, Brutus again employs the metaphor of sickness and health—he sees himself as a physician or a surgeon as well as a priest with respect to the body politic. Brutus is about to perform “A piece of work that will make sick men whole” (308, 2.1.327). That the action contemplated is a profound violation of the Hippocratic Oath goes almost without saying.
Act 2, Scene 2 (308-11, the Ides of March have come, and Calphurnia, Caesar’s wife, on the basis of the prodigies that have occurred in the City, gets him to say he will cancel his expected visit to the Capitol; Decius Brutus arrives and says that the senate means to offer Caesar a crown today, but also that the offer is unlikely to be repeated; Caesar brings up Calphurnia’s ominous “blood fountain” dream, but Decius Brutus puts a positive spin on it, and Caesar departs for the Capitol in the company of Mark Antony and all the conspirators.)
Calphurnia is alarmed about the prodigies appearing as accompaniment to the wild, stormy weather: “graves have yawned and yielded up their dead,” she has heard, and “Fierce, fiery warriors fight upon the clouds …” (308, 2.2.18-19). In responding to Calphurnia, Caesar seems magnificent when he asks, “What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” (309, 2.2.26-27)
Still, Caesar pompously declares himself more dangerous than danger itself: “We are two lions littered in one day,” says he, “And I the elder and more terrible …” (309, 2.2.46-47). Here, he seems no better than a politician who believes his own PR—dangerous because it unfits leaders to exercise power, but more to the point in the context of Julius Caesar, it may blind them to impending dangers. Politicians must be aware of their image, but they must avoid becoming its creature.
When Calphurnia offers Caesar the cover of her own fear, he declares boldly that he will not go to the Capitol today. Not that he is afraid or sick—he simply won’t go. Fortunately for the conspirators, Decius Brutus is able to use Caesar’s vanity to draw him to the Capitol, where he will meet his fate. Decius’s opening comes when Caesar recounts Calphurnia’s dream about his statue, which, “Like a fountain with an hundred spouts, / Did run pure blood; and many lusty Romans / Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it” (310, 2.2.77-79).
Decius Brutus’s interpretive skills work wonders for Caesar’s mood: the dream, he says, “Signifies that from you great Rome shall suck / Reviving blood, and that great men shall press / For tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance” (310, 2.2.87-89). That’s good enough for Caesar.
If, as seems probable, Shakespeare follows the general line that the time has come for Rome to turn imperial, the aging, vainglorious Julius Caesar he depicts is not the right man to wield such enormous power.
Rather, Shakespeare’s representation pays tribute to the difficulty of settling on any one image of such a colossal, polarizing figure as Julius Caesar. On display are certain physical debilities (partial deafness, epilepsy) and character-based weaknesses such as a tendency toward self-inflation and grandiosity, but counter-balancing these traits are an impressive military career, undoubted skills as a ruler, and the sheer spectacle surrounding “Great Caesar’s” every move. The “real” Julius Caesar is a strange concatenation of self-promotion, the opinions swirling around him, and an unknowable number of deep, complex qualities residing within his own spirit.
Act 2, Scene 3 (311, Artemidorus waits for Caesar to pass by in a street procession; this soothsayer’s goal is to hand him a letter revealing the conspiracy that threatens his life.)
A soothsayer named Artemidorus [25] waits for Caesar to walk by him in a street procession on the Ides of March. As he waits, he reads through his own letter, which lays out the extreme danger in which Caesar stands, naming eight of the conspirators against him. [26] Artemidorus is hopeful that the fates will side with the man he considers Rome’s rightful ruler, not the envious conspirators.
Act 2, Scene 4 (311-12, Portia is on pins and needles about the conspirators’ progress at the Capitol; she encounters the soothsayer, who will make a second attempt today to get Caesar’s attention.)
Portia has been informed about the conspiracy in which her husband Brutus is involved, and she sends Lucius to check on what Brutus is doing at the Capitol. She also speaks at home with the soothsayer who warned Caesar back in Act 1, Scene 2. He tells Portia that he fears the worst for Caesar, and then leaves to position himself where he has a chance to catch Caesar’s attention.
Act 3, Scene 1 (312-19, Caesar taunts the soothsayer and deals brusquely with Artemidorus; Popilius wishes Cassius good luck with his “enterprise”; at the Capitol, Metellus Cimber pleads with Caesar about the banishment of his brother Publius; Brutus, Cassius, Cinna, and Decius surround Caesar; Caesar spurns their entreaties; Casca and others stab Caesar; Brutus tells the conspirators to proclaim “liberty” and ponders future restagings of the deed; Antony pretends to offer his friendship to the conspirators; Brutus promises Antony that he may bring Caesar’s body to the marketplace and speak last at his funeral; in soliloquy, Antony reveals his intention to destroy these “butchers.”)
On his way to the Capitol, Caesar catches sight of the soothsayer and says to him, “The Ides of March are come,” and receives the chilling reply, “Ay, Caesar, but not gone” (312, 3.1.102). He is hailed by Artemidorus, who begs him to read his petition. Caesar says, “What touches us ourself shall be last served” (312, 3.1.8).
When the party arrive at the Capitol, a senator named Popilius Lena startles Cassius by saying, “I wish your enterprise today may thrive” (313, 3.1.13). Evidently, Portia isn’t the only other person who knows what is going to happen. Trebonius takes Mark Antony aside to keep him from helping Caesar escape, and Metellus Cimber strikes up a plea for the return of his exiled brother, Publius Cimber. The stage is now set.
Caesar, tyrant-like, castigates Metellus, saying, “Thy brother by decree is banishèd. / If thou dost bend and pray and fawn for him, / I spurn thee like a cur out of my way” (313, 3.1.45-47). Brutus, Cinna, Cassius, and Decius surround Caesar and add their pleas to those of Metellus, which only angers Caesar the more, as he says, “I am constant as the Northern Star” and “I was constant Cimber should be banished / And constant do remain to keep him so” (314, 3.1.61, 73-74).
The conspirators rush to strike at him with their knives. Casca strikes first, and the others join in. According to Shakespeare’s representation, Brutus is the last to stab Caesar, who in some accounts utters his final words, “You too, Brutus? / Et tu, Brutè?” and falls.
Cinna shouts “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! / Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets” (314, 3.1.79-80), Cassius offers a similar thought, and Brutus aims to soothe shocked bystanders.
Brutus is determined to strike the right ceremonial note, telling his fellow conspirators to bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood and make their way to the marketplace, there to proclaim “Peace, freedom, and liberty” (315, 3.1.111) for all.
Cassius and Brutus also consider the historic nature of what they have done, treating it as if it were a piece of stagecraft for the ages. Cassius exclaims, “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!” and Brutus adds, “How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport, / That now on Pompey’s basis lies along / No worthier than the dust!” (315, 3.1.112-17)
Obviously, this is metadramatic on Shakespeare’s part since his English audience is implicated in the callousness implied by Brutus and Cassius’s words. Neither of these Romans has escaped his own narrow ideological construction of events to recognize the bloody horror of the “scene” that he has helped to create. It may be appropriate, if not kind, for audiences sixteen hundred (or two thousand) years on to feel a certain aesthetic distance from one of history’s most consequential murders, but in Brutus and Cassius, it implies dissociation.
Antony does not share in this sentiment. His messenger arrives in advance, and promises that if Antony is satisfied with the conspirators’ reasons for performing such a terrible deed, he will befriend them. Antony’s real reason for this gesture, of course, is to find out how the conspirators plan to peddle what they’ve done. That way, he will be better prepared to undo them.
Antony soon steps in to speak with the conspirators directly. His speech to Brutus and Cassius is a masterpiece of mingled flattery and sly condemnation. First, he asks them to kill him outright if they think it best: “No place,” he says, “will please me so, no mean of death, / As here by Caesar and by you cut off, / The choice and master spirits of this age” (316, 3.1.163-65). Brutus promises a sound explanation, and Antony shakes hands with the conspirators, naming each as he does so.
Antony soon lets slip, though, what he really thinks when he turns to the gashed body of his friend, and addresses him, “Shall it not grieve thee dearer than thy death / To see thy Antony making his peace, / Shaking the bloody fingers of thy foes, / Most noble, in the presence of thy corpse?” (317, 3.1.198-201).
Cassius seems to catch on, but not fully since he asks Antony only, “Will you be pricked in number of our friends, / Or shall we on and not depend on you?” (317, 3.1.218-19) That seems rather naïve.
Antony has two last “asks,” which are that he may be allowed to speak at Caesar’s funeral rites and that for that purpose, he may bestow the body in the marketplace. Cassius wisely opposes the request, but Brutus promises that he himself will speak first and thereby limit the effect of Antony’s words. [27]
For a Roman orator, this shows an astonishing lack of savviness about how public speaking works, especially when one is confronting a master such as Antony, who has no intention of playing by the rules. Brutus is allowing Antony to speak last while standing next to the bleeding corpse of a man who was loved by the people. [28] Brutus has agreed to be the “warmup act” for a much stronger performer.
When Antony is finally left alone, out of the conspirators’ range, he expresses his rage fully in speaking to the dead Caesar: there will be war against these men, and the angry spirit of Caesar, accompanied by Ate, goddess of discord, “Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice / Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war, / That this foul deed shall smell above the earth / With carrion men groaning for burial” (318, 3.1.274-77). No quarter is to be given.
The scene ends with Antony dispatching a servant to tell Octavius that Rome is not yet safe for him to enter. Antony, that is, must still test the public’s reaction to the words he plans to speak about Caesar. Antony is playing chess, it seems, to Brutus and Cassius’s checkers.
Act 3, Scene 2 (319-25, Brutus gives his speech in the marketplace, and says he killed Caesar for his ambition to be king; Antony demolishes Brutus’s references to “ambition,” slyly reverses his own statement that the conspirators are “honorable men,” shows the public Caesar’s wounds; and reads them Caesar’s supposed will, which gifted them parks and cash; furious now with the assassins, the people run to attack them and burn down their houses; a servant tells Antony that Octavius has arrived in Rome and that Brutus and Cassius have fled.)
Brutus speaks first at Caesar’s funeral, and the sum of his argument is, “Not that I loved Caesar less, / but that I loved Rome more” (319, 3.2.21-22) That is, Brutus loved Caesar, but put his country before private amicitia (friendship). Caesar was slain, says Brutus, not for his good qualities, but for his unacceptable ambition. This appeal works upon the people favorably, but only in the absence of Antony’s much more passionate and compelling performance.
The irony of the people’s reaction to Brutus is hard to miss—even as Brutus grounds his actions in the need to prevent monarchy, one of the citizens shouts out, “Let him be Caesar!” and another follows up with, “Caesar’s better parts / Shall be crowned in Brutus” (320, 3.2.47-48). He has killed Caesar, but the rabble want to make him Caesar for doing so. To this, Brutus makes no rebuttal.
Antony’s speech to the common people is a masterpiece from its near-beginning line, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” (321, 3.2.72) to its conclusion with “Here was a Caesar! When comes such another?” (324, 3.2.250) Knowing that the people are at the mercy of their passions, he shapes his utterances carefully to drive them where he wants them to go.
We need not suppose Antony is insincere—the genius of his speech is that he is, like many good actors, skillfully corralling his genuine affection for Caesar into a great force for avenging his death at the hands of men he considers “butchers.”
Antony’s first move is to pretend to honor Brutus’s claim that Caesar deserved to die because he was ambitious, and he works the word “honorable” into his speech for the first of ten times. Brutus and company must be telling the truth because they are all“honorable men” (321, 3.2.81). But even after the first few repetitions of this word, it begins to ring hollow. Antony reduces the conspirators’ arguments to “it’s true because we say so.” Appeal on the basis of ethos (character) is an old standby, and Antony easily demolishes Brutus’s barren self-justification.
Next comes Antony’s mention of the will that Caesar supposedly left behind, one filled with benefits for the people. He at first withholds his assent to their demands to hear this will, the better to create a sham sense of agency in people who agree with whoever is speaking to them presently. His refusal also insinuates that reading the will can only make them angry and violent: “You are not wood, you are not stones, but men; / And being men, hearing the will of Caesar, / It will inflame you, it will make you mad” (322, 3.2.140-42). That is to plant a seed.
Antony goes on to clear a sacred space around Caesar’s body, making the dead dictator an object of veneration. With this move completed, the great orator describes the most shocking moment in Caesar’s assassination: the moment when he realized that his dear friend Brutus, too, was one with the fiendish killers who beset him. “This,” says Antony while pointing to a particular wound on Caesar’s body, “was the most unkindest cut of all” (323, 3.2.181): he refers, of course, to the stab wound inflicted last by none other than Marcus Junius Brutus. [29]
When Caesar registered this ingratitude, says Antony, “Then burst his mighty heart, / And in his mantle muffling up his face, / Even at the base of Pompey’s statue, / Which all the while ran blood, Caesar fell (323, 3.2.184-87). Using Caesar’s multiply stabbed body as a prop, Antony has conjured up the most moving image of the murder imaginable, and it drives the public wild with pity and rage.
Antony then insists that he is no orator like Brutus; [30] no, he’s just “a plain blunt man” (323, 3.2.216) speaking the truth about what happened on the Ideas of March. He goes on to read the will (which the people had all but forgotten) that Caesar supposedly left for the common people of Rome—a will that, claims Antony, gifts them with seventy-five drachmas each and, on top of that, public recreation areas created from his own private gardens and orchards. What a guy!
The people have heard enough by now to make them want to riot and burn down the conspirators’ homes. Antony has led them to believe that honor consists in standing by your friends, which is what he has urged the impassioned crowd to do. As they rush out of the marketplace, Antony tells us what he really thinks: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot; / Take thou what course thou wilt” (324, 3.2.258-59).
The deed that the deluded Brutus and Cassius believed would bring order and liberty, Antony correctly understands as conducive to violence and chaos. Antony knows that Fortune favors those willing to ride the waves of passion arising from great and terrible events, not those who, like Brutus, believe human affairs can be set right by dispassionate reason. For the moment, violence and chaos are Antony’s elements, and with them he will forge a new order with Octavius.
Act 3, Scene 3 (325, Cinna the poet goes out for a walk, and the enraged mob slaughters him because he has the same name as that of one of the conspirators. Any Cinna will do.)
Cinna the poet is probably one of Shakespeare’s most hapless characters. His mistake is to go out walking while the mob that Antony has just harangued into a murderous frenzy is on the hunt for conspirators. Cinna tries to tell them that he’s not that Cinna, the one who helped to kill Caesar, but the truth does him no good: “Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses!” (325, 3.3.29-30)
Act 4, Scene 1 (325-27, Antony meets with Lepidus and Octavius to proscribe their opponents; Antony sends Lepidus to fetch Caesar’s will, and tells Octavius that he holds the man in contempt as a mere soldier; Antony and Octavius plan to raise an army against Brutus and Cassius.)
Antony now shows another side of himself, sitting down with Octavius and Lepidus to proscribe [31] strangers and relatives alike if anyone in this newly formed “Second Triumvirate” [32] finds them threatening. When Lepidus insists that Antony agree to have his own nephew killed, he responds with a callous sentence, “with a spot I damn him” (326, 4.1.6). Proscription was a cruel and lethal practice that already had a substantial history by Antony’s time.
This same cold side allows Antony to send Lepidus on a messenger’s errand (to fetch Caesar’s will) and then, when the man leaves the room, abuse him as a mere pack mule for him and Octavius. This contempt for someone whom Octavius calls “a tried and valiant soldier” (326, 4.2.28) surprises the young man.
In Antony’s view, it’s time to head for the wars that Brutus and Cassius are presently stirring up, and that means raising large armies.
Act 4, Scene 2 (327-28, Brutus and Cassius are at odds over an unnamed disagreement; they agree to settle their quarrel in Brutus’s tent, out of the troops’ hearing.)
Outside Brutus’s tent at Sardis, Cassius approaches his friend and directly accuses him: “Most noble brother, you have done me wrong” (328, 4.2.37). Brutus asks Cassius to keep their disagreements quiet until the troops are at some distance.
Act 4, Scene 3 (328-35, Brutus and Cassius argue in the former’s tent; Brutus mocks Cassius for defending his dishonest dealings; the two men reconcile, and Brutus lets Cassius know that Portia has committed suicide; they plan their military strategy; Brutus declares that they must march toward Philippi and there offer battle to Antony and Octavius; Brutus is visited in his tent by Caesar’s Ghost, who says he will appear to him again at Philippi.)
Brutus and Cassius, now with some privacy in the former’s tent in Sardis, become embroiled in a bitter argument about funding for their armies. Brutus accuses Cassius of behaving corruptly—he says that he has been selling offices and perks for gold. Brutus says, “I did send to you / For certain sums of gold, which you denied me, / For I can raise no money by vile means” (329-30, 4.3.69-71). Cassius admits that he is at fault in not advancing the money Brutus requested.
The two men reconcile: Roman amicitia or friendship once again comes to the rescue. When Brutus sees that his starchy righteousness has humiliated Cassius, he softens and becomes more considerate of his friend’s frailties. “A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities” (330, 4.3.85), pleads Cassius.
Brutus now informs Cassius that Portia has committed suicide (331, 4.3.146, 151-55). Still, the two generals must discuss military strategy. Cassius wants to hold back, but Brutus insists on marching out to meet the enemy, saying, “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries” (333, 4.3.219-22).
This is one of the most famous pronouncements in the play, but the “tide” metaphor is also revealing—although Brutus counsels heroic action, he still sees this action as a reaction, as a principled response to what the rhythm of life brings. Contrast this attitude with Antony and Octavius. Antony is a supreme opportunist: masterful, often proactive, and creative. [33]
By the end of Act 4, Scene 3, Brutus is afflicted with a vision of Julius Caesar, who tells him that he is his “evil spirit” (334, 4.3.286). Caesar says that this visit is simply to inform Brutus that they will meet again at Philippi.
Act 5, Scene 1 (335-38, two great armies confront one another at Philippi in northeastern Greece; in a parley before the battle, Brutus and Cassius trade barbs with Antony and Octavius; Brutus and Cassius say their goodbyes in case the battle doesn’t go their way.)
A parley takes place, during which Brutus and Cassius exchange contemptuous words with Octavius and Antony. Cassius calls these two, respectively, “A peevish schoolboy” and “a masquer and a reveler” (337, 5.1.60-61).
Cassius confides to Messala that while he has never been one for omens and portents, a recent incident in which friendly eagles were replaced by “ravens, crows, and kites” (337, 5.1.86) has shaken his confidence about the “liberators’” prospects for victory. Cassius next asks Brutus what he will do if they lose, and Brutus agrees with Plato over his own Stoic mentors on the matter of suicide.
Brutus and Cassius say their heartfelt farewells, in case things go badly, and Brutus ends the scene on a philosophical note: “Oh, that a man might know / The end of this day’s business ere it come. / But it sufficeth that the day will end …” (338, 5.1.126-28).
Act 5, Scene 2 (338, Brutus dispatches Messala to tell Cassius’s troops that they must advance and defeat Octavius’s wing.)
Brutus sends Messala to deliver an urgent message to Cassius’s legions: they must advance quickly and take advantage of weakness in Octavius’s wing or flank.
Act 5, Scene 3 (338-41, Cassius wrongly believes that his scout Titinius has been captured and that the battle at Philippi is lost; Titinius returns, only to find that Cassius has committed suicide, and so the scout nobly does the same.)
Cassius sends Titinius on a reconnaissance mission to find out whether his side is winning or losing. Pindarus sees Titinius being surrounded by what he believes to be enemy troops, and Cassius is convinced that he and Brutus have lost the battle. He orders Pindarus to hold his sword steady while he, Cassius, runs upon it. That is how Cassius dies, right after he makes his peace with his old foe: “Caesar, thou art revenged, / Even with the sword that killed thee” (339, 5.3.45-46).
Titinius returns wearing a victory wreath—he had not been captured. The news comes too late for Cassius, who died believing all was lost. Titinius transfers his victory wreath to Cassius, and himself commits suicide. Brutus and others arrive soon thereafter, and find Cassius and Titinius’ bodies. Brutus is chastened in spite of the favorable turn, and says, “O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet; / Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords / In our own proper entrails” (340, 5.3.94-96).
Brutus gives orders to remove Cassius’s body to Thasos since holding the funeral rites at Philippi would be distressing for the soldiers. There is one last battle.
Act 5, Scene 4 (341-42, Lucilius pretends to be Brutus and is captured; Cato the Younger dies fighting for the Republican cause; Antony commends Lucilius’s courage and spares his life, and then gives orders to find out whether the real Brutus is still alive.)
Brutus’s army appears to be losing the second battle, and Cato, son of the great Stoic senator, dies fighting. Lucilius sets himself forth as Brutus in an attempt to draw attention away from the real Brutus. Lucilius is captured, but Mark Antony commends him and spares his life. [34]
Act 5, Scene 5 (342-43, Brutus says that he, and not Antony and Octavius, will be well respected in times to come; Strato holds Brutus’s sword steady, and he runs on it and dies; Antony arrives and declares that Brutus, alone among the conspirators, acted from a noble motive; Octavius orders funeral rites for Brutus, and tells Antony that it’s time to “part the glories of this happy day.”)
In the end, Brutus, making his peace with Caesar as Cassius did, says “Caesar, now be still. / I killed not thee with half so good a will” (343, 5.5.50-51), and requests that Strato hold his sword steady while he runs upon it. Expressing confidence, he leaves it to the people of the future to judge his actions: “I shall have glory by this losing day / More than Octavius and Antony” (342, 5.5.36-37).
Octavius and Antony are impressed with the end Brutus makes, and Antony declares him “the noblest Roman of them all” (343, 5.5.68) He alone, says Antony, acted for the general good. But then it’s on to the future, as Octavius indicates to Antony: “let’s away / To part the glories of this happy day” (343, 5.5.80-81).
Reflections on Ancient Rome as the Republic Gave Way to Empire
On the whole, we find in Julius Caesar not so much a wholesale or cynical rejection of the republican, anti-monarchical principles enunciated by Marcus Brutus as a complex, ambivalent exploration of those principles. Ideals seldom, if ever, match events on the ground: participation in almost any kind of politics compels even the best people to abandon or at least compromise their noblest aspirations and their customary civility. This is not to abandon politics since that really isn’t possible; it is to see things as they are without flinching or dissembling.
We might ask, was Brutus right about what the future would say about him, at least in the context of Roman history? Most of us would probably agree that in the broadest possible context—that of political philosophy across the ages—what Brutus tried to do was at least done in support of the better kind of political theory: republicanism, cousin to the more fully participatory democracy of, say, Athens in its golden era.
In the context of ancient Rome, however, we can see that his noble, if bloody, attempt to preserve the republic was futile. Opinions will vary, but the historical consensus seems to be that Rome’s imperial growth, its aggressive international posture, rendered any truly democratic form of government untenable. [35] Julius Caesar may have been the first politician astute enough to acknowledge fully that the old republic was defunct, and as has happened to so many trailblazers, it cost him his life.
Still, the way was made straight for Julius’s adopted son, Octavius, who would go on to be Rome’s first fully fledged emperor, initiating several centuries of Roman history that would put on display both the best and the worst qualities of the imperial and monarchical forms of government. If Caesar was a populist impresario, Octavius, or “Augustus Caesar,” as he is known to us today, is perhaps best understood as something like the CEO of a massive corporation.
[1] In strict historical terms, Shakespeare’s chronology is not accurate since the February Lupercal holiday is conflated with Caesar’s fifth triumph in October of 45 BCE, just five months before his assassination.
[2] See the entry “Lupercal” in History.com. Accessed 8/8/2024.
[3] That is, a shoe repairman.
[4] See the entry “Tribune” in Worldhistory.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[5] Pompey. Crassus died invading Parthia in 53 BCE, and in 48BCE, Pompey was murdered in Egypt after having lost the battle of Pharsalus to Julius Caesar’s smaller forces. See also the later Battle of Munda, in which Pompey’s sons were killed. Imperiumromanun.pl. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[6] See the entry First Triumvirate and Second Triumvirate. Imperiumromanun.pl. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[7] See “Caesar as Dictator….” Worldhistory.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[8] See “Proscription in Ancient Rome.” Imperiumromanun.pl. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[9] Since gaining their freedom from Etruscan kings, the Romans had for centuries struggled with balancing their desire for self-determination with the reality of nearly constant class warfare between the rich and the poor. This struggle, in turn, meant that often-destructive demagoguery and populism were never far from the great City’s reality. See, for example, Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. Public Affairs, 2018 (reprint ed.). ISBN-13:978-1541724037.
[10] See Plutarch. Life of Pompey. Gutenberg e-text. Accessed 8/10/2024. See also “The Roman Triumph.” Pressbooks.bccampus.ca. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[11] See entry “Marcus Junius Brutus.” Worldhistory.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[12] See entry “Gaius Cassius Longinus.” Worldhistory.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[13] Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. A. S. Kline. Romanroadstatic.com. Accessed 8/10/2024. See Bk. II.705-29.
[14] See “Lucius Junius Brutus” in Livius.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[15] See “Alice Roosevelt Longworth Quotes.” Goodreads.com. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[16] See “The Stoics’ View of Suicide.” Psychology Today. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[17] Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. The relevant quote occurs in Book 4, Chapter 4: “Captains of Industry.”
[18] As the Norton introduction to Julius Caesar points out on pg. 281, Shakespeare brackets out the way Julius Caesar attained the level of power he held at the time of his murder. However, his bringing destruction to northern Europe’s tribes and crossing the Rubicon aside, it remains true that Caesar was a man of considerable merit; he was cultivated and by no means a boor or a brute.
[19] See Acton’s Law as stated in his correspondence with Archbishop Creighton. Oll.libertyfund.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[20] Titus Livius. Ab Urbe Condita. Book I, Chs. 57-60. Perseus Project. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[21] See IMDB’s entry “Judge Dredd.” Accessed 8/10/2024.
[22] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 917-69. See “Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” (930, 2.1.42).
[23] It is odd that Brutus’s analogy references the concept of monarchy, but it was common in Shakespeare’s time to make political analogies using the functioning of the human body. See Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 1072-1152. See Menenius’s “belly” analogy at 1074-75, 1.1.87-96, 98-104, 119-32.
[24] Norton footnote 8 for 302.
[25] Artemidorus. The name seems to be drawn from a later historical individual, a soothsayer and writer on prophecy. See Brittanica.com’s entry “Artemidorus.” Accessed 8/9/2024.
[26] There were reportedly at least 40 senators who were in on the conspiracy. Shakespeare has reduced that figure to a manageable number. See “The Death of Caesar: Do We Know the Whole Story?” Historyextra.com. Accessed 8/9/2024.
[27] According to Plutarch, Brutus spoke to the people immediately after the murder of Caesar; Antony spoke at the funeral on March 20, 44 BCE. See Plutarch’s Life of Marcus Brutus.
[28] See “Mark Antony’s Oration at Caesar’s Funeral.” Worldhistory.org. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[29] In The Divine Comedy, Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest section of the inferno for that reason: they are traitors to their lord. See also Cicero’s fine treatise De Amicitia, or “On Friendship,” and Seneca’s Letters, deal with the concept of friendship insightfully. See especially Letter IX.
[30] An appeal to the speaker’s ethos, or character.
[31] On the ghoulish practice of proscription, see Norton footnote 4, 327. See also “Proscription in Ancient Rome.” Imperiumromanun.pl. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[32] See Second Triumvirate. Word History Encyclopedia. Accessed 8/10/2024.
[33] Antony is closer to the view of Edmund in King Lear: “All with me’s meet that I can fashion fit” (775, 1.2.162). See Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Folio with additions from the Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 764-840.
[34] On the “fog of war” (i.e. confusions inherent in military action) in ancient times, See this interesting discussion on Reddit: “How thick was the fog of war …?” r/askhistorians. Accessed 8/10/2024. Ancient armies did not, of course, have “high-tech” means of communication, so it would have been difficult for even the ranking officers to know at all times what was happening. [continued ….]
See, for example, Shakespeare, William. The Life of Henry the Fifth. Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 790-857. When the French Herald Montjoy encounters England’s King Henry V at the end of the Battle of Agincourt, Henry doesn’t know whether he has won or lost: “I tell thee truly, herald, / I know not if the day be ours or no, / For yet a many of your horsemen peer / And gallop o’er the field.” (843, 4.7.75-78)
[35] In the wake of Caesar, was Rome’s transformation to empire inevitable? See “How to Establish an Empire. The Emperor Augustus Transforms Rome.” The Collector. Accessed 8/10/2024.
Last Updated on April 15, 2025 by ajd_shxpr