![]() ![]() This is the play’s tragic irony, and some knowledge of Roman history can help us to appreciate it. and then by conquering his former ally Antony at Actium in 31 B.C.E. Octavius Caesar became sole emperor of Rome by defeating the conspirators in the final battle at Philippi in 42 B.C.E. The Roman Republic, however, never existed in the pure form in which the conspirators imagine it, and the reign of terror unleashed by their assassination of Caesar gave rise precisely to the rule of “one man” that they hoped to prevent. ![]() with liberty and justice for all.”) Brutus, once he is convinced that Caesar “would be crowned,” sees himself as destined to repeat his ancestor’s heroic mission: by killing Caesar, he will, he thinks, restore the true “Rome”-the Republic. (The government of the United States, in which power is shared among the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, is modeled on the Roman Republic, and the pledge of allegiance to the flag mentions “the republic . . . Then, supposedly, no one man can dominate Rome all male citizens will be free, and equal. They see themselves as Romans because they believe in the Republic and because they repudiate kingship so that power can be shared among the elected rulers, the aristocratic patricians who make up the Senate, and the people. Both Cassius and Brutus equate Rome with the Republic and the values it purports to embody. that drove the reigning dynasty from Rome, abolished kingship itself, and established the Roman Republic. The Tarquin drive when he was called a king.Īs many in Shakespeare’s audience might have known, Rome began as a kingship that lasted some 150 years until Lucius Junius Brutus, ancestor of this play’s Brutus, led an uprising in 510 B.C.E. My ancestors did from the streets of Rome Th’ eternal devil to keep his state in RomeĪ few scenes later (2.1), Brutus wrestles with the question of whether Caesar intends to become king, and recalls his own namesake: There was a Brutus once that would have brooked Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! . . . When Cassius tries to persuade his friend Brutus that they must halt Julius Caesar’s rise to power, Cassius speaks of an idealized “Rome” of the past in which kingship was unthinkable: ![]()
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