56 pages • 1 hour read
William ShakespeareJulius Caesar
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1599A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
How Hubris Can Lead to One’s Downfall
Caesar’s tragic flaw is his hubris or excessive arrogance. Hubris is a common character trait of tragic figures in drama, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. Throughout the play, Caesar is warned by many individuals and omens to “Beware the ides of March” (1.2.19). He is given warnings both divine—the storm, ghosts walking the streets of Rome—and human—Calpurnia’s dream, Artemidorus’s warning—and he ignores them all.
Caesar is a larger-than-life figure who recognizes his own status in his society. He has accomplished much, but he is not invulnerable. When confronted with the danger of his situation, he scoffs and says, “Danger knows full well/ That Caesar is more dangerous than he./ We are two lions littered in one day,/ And I the elder and more terrible” (2.2.44-48). Caesar speaks of himself in the superlative; he is more dangerous than danger. When confronted about his inflexibility toward pardoning Cimber’s brother, he compares himself to the North Star, fixed in its position in the heavens and immovable. He refuses mercy because it is a quality of his public image that he remains constant in his decisions. Aloof to the danger around him, this reaction to Cimber’s entreaty is the catalyst to his assassination. His pride thus becomes his downfall.
While Brutus is less defined by hubris than Caesar, he too is susceptible to over-confidence, particularly in the wake of the assassination. Against Cassius’s warnings, Brutus allows Mark Antony to live. Even worse, he permits Mark Anthony to deliver a speech following Caesar’s death which turns the public against the conspirators and causes a civil war. Brutus’s arrogance also takes shape as a form of civic hubris, in that he believes the Roman Republic can survive as long as Caesar is stopped, a naive belief proven wrong by history.
The Persuasive Power of Rhetoric
According to the Greek Philosopher Aristotle, Rhetoric can be thought of as the art of persuasion. Elizabethan education was firmly rooted in learning and employing rhetorical devices and appeals in one’s writing. Though Shakespeare was not formally educated like many of his contemporary writers, he successfully employs rhetorical devices throughout his writings, giving an added depth to the persuasive power of his characters’ words.
In Julius Caesar, the most skillful use of rhetorical appeals comes in Act III, Scene 2 in Brutus’s address to the plebeians and Mark Antony’s funerary speech for Caesar. Both characters aim to convince the crowd to take their side; Anthony wants revenge, and, as he had a hand in Caesar’s assassination, Brutus’s life depends on winning the crowd over. They both make appeals to the classical elements of rhetoric: pathos, an appeal to emotion; ethos, an appeal to ethics/credibility; and logos, an appeal to reason and logic.
Mark Antony proves to be the most persuasive, making a greater appeal to pathos than Brutus. Brutus relies on the logic that Caesar deserved to die because he was ambitious. He stakes his claim on his own suffering: Caesar was a dear friend, and consequently, the decision to kill him was not made lightly. However, his appeal to love and friendship seems calculated. Mark Antony, on the other hand, demonstrates his love for Caesar rather than merely describing it, reminding the crowd of the many deeds Caesar accomplished for the plebeians. He also dramatically reveals Caesar’s wounded, dead body—a shocking sight that ultimately incites the already emotional crowd to violence. Mark Antony incites a mutiny through his clever use of rhetoric, never actually speaking out against the conspirators and instead using the emotional impact of his words to persuade his audience.
How Shakespeare Uses the Greek Notion of Hamartia
Tragedy has its roots in the ancient Greek dramatic tradition. According to Aristotle, tragedy is supposed to arouse feelings of fear and pity, resulting in catharsis, the purging of those emotions. Tragedies should also concern the fall of a person of great stature. This fall is brought about by hamartia, a fatal character flaw that leads to the hero’s downfall. Not all of Shakespeare’s tragedies conform to Aristotle’s definition, but Julius Caesar fits in with this tradition.
Under an Aristotelian definition of tragedy, Brutus, not Caesar, becomes the tragic hero of the play. For one thing, Caesar dies early on in the third act of the play, giving Brutus far more stage time. Even before Caesar’s death, it is Brutus’s moral dilemma that drives the action of the first two acts of the play. The events following Caesar’s assassination are driven by the consequences of Brutus’s decision. Caesar is too flawed to be the tragic hero; his death is pitiful, due to the nature of Brutus’s betrayal, but he had plenty of warning and chose to ignore it. Brutus, on the other hand, wrestled with the emotional, ethical, and moral implications of killing a tyrant who was also a close friend. It is only after much persuasion by Cassius and the other conspirators that Brutus decides to side against Caesar.
Brutus is driven by honor, virtue, morality, and, above all, a love for the Roman Republic. He is trusting by nature, a virtue that causes him to take Mark Antony at his word that he will not speak out against the conspirators at Caesar’s funeral oration. This trust in Mark Antony's honor spirals into the civil war that culminates in Brutus committing suicide to avoid capture. His sense of honor leads to his death, but even Anthony, his enemy, respects and venerates Brutus because of it.
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