Speaker 1: If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less. If I shot someone in Fifth Avenue, I would not lose any voters. The decay that Shakespeare depicts in Rome is mirrored in America today. Not only did Caesar know about the assassination, he actively goaded it and he actively wanted to die. Shakespeare took an explanation from his primary source that made a lot of sense, threw it out, and added something that seemingly made no sense. It's precisely the dictator who champions the cause of the people. Pay attention to omens. They tell you about the will of the gods, or at the very least, the minds of men. Horoscopes and astrology are on the rise again. That's also reflective of a bourgeois individualism, an exaggerated self-obsession, and a disconcern for the country at large. Even though I don't believe in the omens of astrology, I find the rise of astrology to be a very bad omen. So will America fall like Rome? Does America need her own Caesar? Studying this book will give us clues to that question, so let us dive in. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is one of the most important achievements by the greatest master of the English language about a world historic event concerning the most influential political leader in the West. And that alone makes it worth reading. But what makes this a must-read is two reasons. First, it describes a collapsing Roman Republic that has frightening similarities to contemporary America. The central question it asks is, can Rome be saved? Can liberty survive? And its answer will illuminate our political situation today. But just as it explores the grandest of questions of the political, the national, the world historic, it also wrestles with an incredibly intimate dimension of our lives that concern all of us. The second reason to read Shakespeare's Caesar is that it explores the consequences of living life as if you were on a stage. What happens when you focus on appearance over reality? What happens when you drink your own Kool-Aid? What are the costs of taking those stories you tell yourself about yourself a bit too seriously? This is the essence of this book. And it could not be more relevant for people in the 21st century who are constantly made to dramatize their lives. When we look for a job, we need to pretend we aren't just looking for a job, but advancing in a long career with a purpose, with a direction, with a telos. When we apply to college today, we need to write an essay that dramatizes our life as if destined to culminate in that college. Social media is literally about projecting an ideal of who you are, not just to impress others, but also to prove something to yourself. This very lecture itself, like most digital content, is theatrical. But what happens when you don't treat it as theater? What happens when you fully commit to these narratives, even when they become disjointed from reality? My name is Jonathan B. I'm studying the great books and sharing their insights through lectures and interviews. If you want to join my journey and learn with me, please subscribe. And without further ado, Shakespeare's Caesar. Shakespeare's Caesar explores what it's like to live theatrically. And to give you an idea of what this means, of what is at stake, of the terrible power and danger, let me tell you an incredible story about someone who's clearly held captive by a narrative. And that's John Wilkes Booth, who, as we all know, is Abraham Lincoln's assassin. What you probably don't know is how much Brutus, the protagonist of our play who killed Caesar, was a role model for Booth. Brutus's conspiracy mediated Booth's conspiracy. It gave him the language, the self-conception. It told Booth how to think about what he was doing. In the same way that Brutus tried to kill Caesar because he was worried about tyranny, destroying the Roman Republic, Booth thought that he was also killing a tyrant. In a very strong sense, Booth was playing Brutus in his assassination of Lincoln. And I don't just mean the location of where it happened, which is a theater. Booth was born into a leading theatrical family of the time. He himself was brought up as no other than a Shakespearean actor. Booth took part in playing Julius Caesar months before the assassination as Mark Antony. But afterwards, Booth said that his favorite role of all time was Shakespeare's Brutus. And get this, John Wilkes Booth's dad is called Junius Brutus Booth. It's almost as if through his dad's name and his own career that Booth was fated to become Brutus. And I think that's quite poetic because Brutus also seemed fated to become who he was. Brutus was also playing someone else when he was assassinating Caesar. Brutus was playing his ancestor, Lucius Brutus, who drove out the King Tarquin at the end of the Roman Kingdom and then founded the Roman Republic. This is the tremendous power and danger that a name narrative has even after 2,000 years. And this is a theme that we're going to come back to again and again in this lecture about how a narrative can overtake reality itself. So that's one poetic parallel between Rome and America. What I want to do now is I want to give you a systematic introduction to how these two civilizations are similar. Because I want to show you why it's important to read this book today. More so than any other civilization, it was the Roman Republic that America's founders looked up to when they were building this country. It was the Republican government, it was the checks and balances, it was the institutions, the laws, it was the authors, the orders, even the architecture of the governmental buildings. But the strongest connection must be the love of liberty and the aversion to monarchy. The Roman Republic defined itself through its founding event, Lucius Brutus, Brutus' ancestor, chasing Tarquin out in the same way that America defines its identity by chasing out the British monarchy. Now given the similarity of these two nations, what was extremely alarming reading this book was seeing just how much of the decay that Shakespeare depicts in Rome is mirrored in America today. And there was one single line in Act I that you will not be able to unsee once you see it. So let me give you some context behind Act I. In the first scene of this play, we are treated to Caesar's triumph in Rome. So a triumph is a Roman military parade that a general is awarded for a great victory. And so you would parade all the enemies you captured you would parade the slaves, you would have murals and arts, you would bring exotic creatures. Caesar once brought 40 elephants, parading them around the city. So this is one of the most prestigious and honorable things that could happen to a general. So that you could show the entire city all of your achievements, and it was a true festivity. But there was something very odd about Caesar's triumph. Usually, triumphs are only granted for victory against foreign enemies. But this particular triumph was granted for Caesar's victory over Pompey's sons in the recently concluded civil war. So this was granted for a civil war. Now for some historical context here, the events of this book, which described the fall of the Republic, happened about 500 years ago. For the first 400 years, Rome's division of powers, its constitutional balances, largely prevented any strongmen from wielding tyrannical power. But for the last 100 years, so 100 years leading up to this event, Rome suffered a series of civil wars that saw one strongman usurp the next and increasingly consolidate the power. So it became a civil war. So it began with Marius, then it was Sulla, then it was Pompey, and now it's Caesar. And the effect of this century of conflict is that even though the Republic stood in name, both its institutions and its values were on the verge of collapse. The love of liberty, the love of country, gave way to friendships and allegiances with individual strongmen. And you can see that in this very first scene for the very fact that this triumph was granted for a civil war. In an age where Romans primarily thought about themselves as Romans, you can never do that because what a civil war is, you're celebrating the killing of other Romans. Okay, so that's the historical context behind the scene. In this first scene, we are treated to the mob, the people watching the triumph. And the mob loves Caesar. They're absolutely enamored with him. And this is that one line that reminded me so much of contemporary America. If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less. So this is commenting on the mob's love of Caesar. And what it's saying is that if Caesar stabbed their mothers, they would still love him. Who does that mean? If Caesar stabbed their mothers, they would do no less. If I shot someone in Fifth Avenue, I would not lose any voters. Let me be crystal clear here. I don't think it's wrong as much as it is uninteresting to make this a critique about individual personalities. Because that line that Shakespeare wrote is more damning for the people of America. Because that line that Shakespeare wrote is more damning for Rome than it is for Caesar. If Trump is right, if he really can shoot someone and not lose voters, what is to be pitied is not Trump, but America. Because what does it say about a republic if your top leader can stab people's mothers and shoot people without losing any respect? What does it say about the integrity of its legal institutions when it will convict and declare its top leader a felon? And what does it say about the public support of such legal institutions when most people don't seem to care? This recently happened in Trump's conviction as a felon, as well as when Caesar crossed the Rubicon and was declared a felon. Every scene we are shown of the Roman people in Shakespeare's Caesar is always a picture of degeneration. The people are fickle. They're incapable of deliberation. They're lacking any degree of judgment. So what is necessary to support a free country is an independent and freedom-loving people. And it is clear that Rome had lost that by the time of this book, by the time of Caesar. Is this also where America is today? One can certainly point to many indications that it is, right? Liberty, freedom doesn't seem to motivate the new generation as much. The founding fathers are being torn down left and right. Elites are becoming less patriotic and much more willing to leave. Politicization and division are on the rise. And this late Republican period of crisis in Rome happened about, you know, 350 years, 400 years in. America is about 250 years old. So will America fall like Rome? Does America need her own Caesar? Studying this book will give us clues to that question. So let us dive in. We're going to spend the rest of this lecture examining a few key events so that we can really understand who our main characters are. First, Brutus, then Caesar, then Mark Antony, which also chronologically lines up quite well with the plot. So let's begin with Brutus. Now, Brutus, by all traditional accounts, is the true protagonist of this play, not Caesar. He's by far the most amount of lines, almost four times the amount of lines of Caesar. It's Brutus' decisions that really move the plot forward. And it's Brutus' side that we follow throughout the plot. Act one, Brutus is deliberating whether he needs to kill Caesar. Act two, Brutus decides he needs to kill Caesar and he gathers the conspirators. Act three, Brutus kills Caesar, funeral oration. Act four, Brutus rivals with his friend Cassius, they quarrel. And act five, Brutus is defeated and commits suicide. Julius Caesar is an odd play where it does not bear the name of its true protagonist. And we're going to talk about why when we talk about Caesar. But I can already tell you why Shakespeare chose Brutus as a central character. Brutus is by far the most interesting character out of this entire cast, if not for just one reason. Brutus, who leads the conspiracy, does not have good reasons to kill Caesar. Let me repeat that. The guy who kills Caesar struggles to come up with good reasons to kill Caesar. So I'm going to read Brutus' soliloquy in act two, when he comes to the decision to kill Caesar, where he explains his reasoning why he's going to kill Caesar. Okay, so this is his soliloquy. So Brutus is saying that there's no private grievance. It's not like he's envious of Caesar or Caesar did him any wrong. He would be crowned. How that might change his nature, there's the question. Okay, that's a hypothetical, right? He would be crowned and then followed by an open question. How that might change his nature. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder and that craves weary walking. So an adder is a poisonous viper. What he's saying here is that a bright day, a good thing, a crown can bring forth a bad thing, a viper, a tyrant. Okay, so he's again, he's not giving any examples. He's just arguing by analogy. Okay, so that's a double hypothetical there. If he were crowned, he may do danger with his power. But then Brutus immediately refutes himself. And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reasoning. Okay, so he's arguing by analogy. He's not giving any examples. He's arguing by analogy. But then Brutus immediately refutes himself. And to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affection swayed more than his reason. Okay, so he's saying here, given everything that he knows about Caesar, he doesn't likely have tyrannical tendencies. He can't think about one example. But then Brutus finishes his soliloquy by trying to use a general case to justify his killing. But tis a common proof that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, where to the climber upward turns his face. But when he once attains the utmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend. So Caesar may. So this last part, he's saying that Caesar may, after climbing the ladder of power, kick it away. He may. Okay, there's something incredibly odd about this soliloquy, which is that this doesn't like, this isn't reasons for killing Caesar at all, right? If anything, this is a defense of Caesar. He's done no wrong. He's not given a crown. And even stronger, he hasn't even given us any signs that if he were given a crown, he would do wrong. The only arguments that he levies against Caesar are hypotheticals, couched in conditionals, and general abstractions, right? So if he were made king and this were true, then he might do this. And yet the conclusion that Brutus comes to is that Caesar must die. What makes Brutus's inability to come up with reasons to kill Caesar all the more puzzling is that there are clear reasons to kill Caesar. Okay, so Brutus is completely wrong. Caesar is already giving many signs of being a tyrant. Let me just name a few. He crossed the Rubicon. He's dictator for life. Caesar refers himself to the third person. Caesar got offered a crown thrice. Caesar bosses other senators around like slaves. Caesar calls the Senate, my Senate, his Senate, right? The possessive. And then one time when he wanted to cancel a Senate meeting after it already started and they asked, well, why? Caesar said, I don't need to give you any reasons. My will is enough. Deciding based on arbitrary will rather than reason. That's what, that's like the literal definition of tyranny. Okay, so the plot thickens. Not only can Brutus, who is determined to kill Caesar, not find any fault with Caesar, he can't find any fault with Caesar when there are many clear signs of fault. And before we try to determine what Brutus's real motivations are, I want to give you a bit more context behind Brutus the man and tell you why understanding Brutus's motivation is key to cracking this play. I mean, for starters, everyone else's motivations are pretty obvious. Caesar desires glory. Cassius, fellow conspirator, is envious of Caesar. That's why he kills him. Antony is mad at the conspirators, mad at the assassins. He wants revenge. But Brutus, sometimes we see Brutus behaving tyrannically like a tyrant himself in his own camp. But sometimes we see what appears to be a genuine love for republican ideals. Sometimes we see Brutus almost desire Caesar's glory for himself. And yet even Brutus's enemies, after Brutus is defeated, they say, this is the most noble Roman. Every other assassin killed Caesar out of envy. Only Brutus did it out of a concern for the common good. The mystery here around Brutus's psychology is what drives this play. And I think that's quite an incredible achievement by Shakespeare. Because in a play with armies and battles, with intrigue and assassination, with the fate of the West hanging in the balance, what is most enticing and intriguing is the psychology of one man. But I'm going to go even stronger here. Studying Brutus's psychology is one of the best ways to study the conflict of this play. Because Brutus's psychology is a microcosm of the tensions in Rome. I quote to you, Brutus, between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, okay, so between thinking about killing Caesar and actually killing him, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream. The genius and the mortal instruments, so the genius being his higher ideals and the moral instruments being his flesh and bone body, are then in counsel. And the state of man, like to a little kingdom, suffers then the nature of an insurrection. What Brutus is saying here is that his psychology is being torn apart in the same way that Rome is. That the insurrection in his soul is just like the insurrection that he's about to stage. Here's the lesson, I think. For a people living in civil strife of a polis and disorder, public tensions will find their way into your private life. Whether that's arguments over pronouns, finding their way into school boards and board meetings, whether that's a presidential election, right? Dividing a Thanksgiving dinner. The public tensions of a society will find their way into the private life of citizens such that the internal psychology of the citizens matches the tension felt in the state itself. Brutus then becomes the perfect way for Shakespeare to study Rome's conflict because Brutus is sitting at the very crossroads of the public strife. Brutus absorbs both Rome's love and its hate for Caesar. On one hand, Brutus genuinely loves Caesar. He genuinely cares about him. When Brutus was a young child, his father was killed by Pompey and Caesar took his mother Servilia as his own mistress. So Caesar was always near Brutus when he was a little child. Caesar had such a paternal fondness for Brutus that had led a lot of historians to speculate that he was the real father. When Brutus grew up, Caesar and Pompey had their civil war. Brutus surprisingly joined Pompey's side given that Pompey killed his dad. And so Brutus actively tried to defeat and essentially kill Caesar. Pompey failed. Brutus failed. And not only did Caesar immediately pardon Brutus, he backed him immediately for some of the most prestigious governmental offices in Rome. First, he appointed Brutus to be the governor of Cisalpine Gaul and then Praetor. That's the second highest level of office in Rome. Only second to consulship. So think about how indebted Brutus must feel to Caesar. He's a father figure that you've known since a child. You sided against him in the civil war. You tried to kill him. You failed. Not only does he pardon you, he immediately welcomes you back as if nothing happened and puts his full weight and support behind you. Here's an analogy just to give you an idea of how incredible this is. Think about how generous the father appears in the prodigal son story in the Bible, right? Caesar, I would argue, is infinitely more generous than the father. Why? Because the prodigal son at least didn't try to kill the father. But Brutus did. Brutus literally joined Caesar's arch rival Pompey. And yet still Caesar welcomed him back with open arms. So Brutus is probably the person in entirety of Rome who has the most reasons to love Caesar. But he's also the person in the entirety of Rome with the most reasons to hate Caesar, to kill Caesar because of who his ancestor is. Brutus' famous ancestor is Lucius Brutus. He's Rome's founding father. He's Rome's George Washington, essentially. And if Lucius Brutus is known for anything, driving out tyrants and holding impartial justice. So Lucius Brutus was born in the late Roman kingdom. Tarquin the king was a tyrant. He drove him out, built the Roman Republic. And when he found out that his two sons were conspiring to re-establish the monarchy, he painfully but impartially sentenced his own two sons to die. So that's the type of person that not only Brutus has been looking up to since he was a child, but that everyone expects Brutus to become. And so when Caesar starts consolidating power, everyone in that society is expecting Brutus as the head of the Brutus household and the lineage holder to fulfill his role of being a tyrant slayer. The only analogy, the only modern analogy that comes even close is like Brony James and LeBron, right? If your dad is the greatest basketball player of his generation, it doesn't really matter what you want to do. People are going to expect you to play basketball. Okay, so those are the two ways that Brutus is related to Caesar. And it mirrors all the reasons that Rome itself has to thank Caesar, love Caesar, but also to be wary of Caesar and hate Caesar. And this is why in our first introduction to Brutus in Act I, we see him deliberating with Cassius because he genuinely has a terrifying decision to make. Either Brutus has to betray the Republic, betray his ancestors, betray the Brutus name, or he has to betray his own father figure essentially, right? A man who's shown him nothing but kindness. The way that Brutus makes this impossible decision is through his friend Cassius. So Cassius is a fellow Roman noble, a fellow conspirator, but Cassius does not have a comparable love for Caesar. And frankly, he doesn't have a comparable love for the Republic either. Cassius is mostly, not entirely, but mostly motivated by envy of Caesar's position. So Cassius just wants Caesar dead, but Cassius knows that this assassination can only work if you have Brutus holding the knife, right? If the tyrant slaying guy is not involved in your tyrant killing efforts, your whole enterprise is going to seem to lack legitimacy. So Cassius in Act I desperately tries to convince Brutus to join his conspiracy. And he does that through rhetoric, through appealing to his pride, his lineage, and then he does something a lot more tricky. Cassius writes fake letters as if they came from ordinary citizens urging Brutus to kill Caesar and throws them into Brutus's house. Okay, so with that context out of the way, I want to go back to the question regarding Brutus's motivations. How do we get from the deliberation in Act I to the firm conviction in beginning of Act II? And my reading is that it's Cassius's rhetoric and his fake letters that got to Brutus. Cassius's letters turn the assassination from a private conspiracy in the shadows to something that appears to be commissioned by the general will. Cassius propped up a narrative of Brutus as the heroic liberator, and it gave that narrative a seemingly ecstatic public audience. In other words, Cassius gave Brutus a role to play in the theater of Roman political life, and he encouraged his entry into that theater with exaggerated applause. So just as Booth was playing a character in his assassination of Lincoln, Brutus, Brutus is also playing a character in his assassination of Caesar, right? And he's playing his ancestor, Lucius Brutus. When I say that Brutus is playing Lucius Brutus, what I mean here is that Brutus wants to primarily appear as a liberator, not just to others but also to himself. But wanting to appear as a liberator is very different from wanting to liberate the republic. And all of Brutus's disastrous decisions that will eventually doom him and the conspiracy can be made light of in this distinction. Brutus's vanity causes him to make two disastrous decisions, not including Cicero among the conspirators, and not including Antony, Caesar's right-hand man, in the list to kill. Okay, so let's focus on the first decision, not including Cicero, not welcoming him in the conspirators. So the scene, again, takes place in Act II. Brutus decides he needs to kill Caesar. He invites all the fellow conspirators into his house. And they're planning the logistics, right? Who else do we invite? Where do we do it? Everyone but Brutus suggests that they should invite Cicero, who at this point is this wise elderly statesman with a great reputation who would lend not just legitimacy to the assassination, but also be of strategic benefit. But Brutus vetoes the inclusion of Cicero with one line. I quote to you, Oh, name him not, let us not break with him, for he will never follow anything that other men begin. So Brutus vetoes the inclusion of Cicero because he claims that Cicero won't be able to follow what others begin. So Cicero wants to be in charge. Cicero can't be the second in command. That's very odd because there's nothing in this play that indicates that's who Cicero was. In fact, the historical Cicero is known, he's infamous for compromising, right? Which is literally following what other men begin. Okay. What's even odder here is that this is a detail that Shakespeare himself added. So Shakespeare's primary historical source when he was writing Julius Caesar was Plutarch's lives. And he's pretty good about following the history. But in this instance, Plutarch actually had a much more reasonable reason for why they didn't include Cicero. Plutarch says Brutus and the conspirators didn't include Cicero because of Cicero's timidity and his age. That makes a lot more sense. So this is what's confusing. Shakespeare took an explanation from his primary source that made a lot of sense, threw it out and added something that seemingly made no sense. So it must be very significant. And I think this is what Shakespeare is trying to tell us. I think what Shakespeare is trying to nudge us to is that it's Brutus who can't bear following others. It's Brutus who needs to lead the enterprise. It's Brutus who can't bear being second in command. And he's worried that having Cicero, someone as reputable, as authoritative as him, would take away from the narrative that he was the leader of this conspiracy. Because think about the implicit assumption behind Brutus's utterance, right? That if Cicero were to join, he wouldn't want to follow. Well, that assumes that Cicero would have to follow, which assumes that Brutus would be the one leading. What this reminds me of are early stage startup founders who sometimes get queasy when they hire someone so good that they almost could be the CEO. Now, on the converse, I have a lot of respect for startup founders who actively hire a CEO whom they then have to report to, right? Like Eric Schmidt with Google. Because it shows you what their priority is. They want to build a good organization, even if they're not the ones leading it. So if Brutus really cared about liberating the republic, he would say, look, let's try to assemble the best team to get the job done, regardless if I'm leading it. If Cicero doesn't want to appear that he's following, let's flatter him. Okay, let's make him an equal partner. Let's tell him it was his idea. But Brutus doesn't do that. And I think that tells you about the priority of Brutus. And so I think through this very clever addition, Shakespeare's giving us a clue that Brutus cares a lot more about playing Lucius Brutus, the leader of the liberators, than actually liberating the republic. And those priorities is also why Brutus makes the second disastrous decision. So in the same scene, again, all the conspirators say, we must kill Antony. Okay, this man's a wild dog. He's very dangerous. And it turned out to be right. It was absolutely fatal for them. But again, Brutus vetoes it. And I'm going to read you his reasons. Pay attention to how dominant appearances factor in his reasoning. Our course will seem too bloody, Caius Cassius, to cut the head off and then hack the limbs, like wrath and death and envy afterwards. For Antony is but a limb of Caesar. Let's be sacrificers, but not butchers, Caius. Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods, not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds. This shall make our purpose necessary and not envious, which so appearing to the common eyes, we shall be called perjurers, not murderers. We shall be called perjurers. It shall appear necessary. Our course will seem too bloody. Brutus cares much more about the appearance and the purpose of the sacrifice. And you can see that in the central metaphor he uses here between sacrificers and butchers. What is a butcher? Someone who gets the job done, even if they appear very bloody by doing so. You walk home with the meat. Sacrifice is the exact opposite. Okay, you don't get to eat the food after sacrifice because it's for the gods. But sacrifice is pretty. Sacrifice is theatrical. It's a theater put on display for the gods, right? It's a dish fit for the gods. Okay, let me be clear. I don't want to go overboard. There are good reasons not to kill Antony. And in fact, appearances matter a lot in such an enterprise. Appearances, in fact, might be the most important means to give your assassination legitimacy. But it's clear that Brutus doesn't treat it as a means, but as an end. By the way, this is another addition by Shakespeare. Plutarch, again, gives Brutus much better reasons for sparing Antony. What Shakespeare is trying to do here is to give us a Brutus who's too caught up in playing his ancestor, Lucius Brutus. But it's a crude imitation. It's simply imitating Lucius Brutus's superficial actions without understanding the deeper ends that he aimed to achieve. Brutus fails to recognize that to bring about liberty and freedom in different political environments, this is a good lesson for us, could sometimes require polar opposite means. For example, it might even help if you gave Caesar a crown. So there's a motion going on in the Senate right now to give Caesar a crown in everywhere but Italy, which would effectively, Italy is the power center. So that would effectively turn him into a constitutional monarch who's still restrained by laws. And frankly, this is probably one of the best suggestions in the entire play of going forward for Rome. But Brutus doesn't even consider that. Why? Because Lucius Brutus didn't give Tarquin a crown. He took the crown away. Brutus is much too focused on the title king and not the deeper cause of liberty. And you can see that in how he interprets what his ancestor did. My ancestors did from the streets of Rome the Tarquin drive when he was called a king. That's not why Lucius Brutus drove out Tarquin. It wasn't because he was called a king. It was because he was a tyrant. Not all kings are tyrants and not all kings harm liberty. This, by the way, is also why Brutus missed all of those clear signs that Caesar is already becoming a tyrant. It's because Caesar right now does not have the official title king and so Brutus just completely ignores all Caesar's bad behavior. Brutus's superficial imitation of Lucius Brutus not only constrains his imagination about how to engender liberty but also blinds him to the diverse forms that tyranny can take. So I'm just gonna leave you one last image of Brutus to show you how much he's considering his enterprise, his assassination in theatrical terms. So what I'm about to read you is Cassius and Brutus and the conspirators just killed Caesar. Body's still warm. They're in the senate house. This is what Cassius and Brutus say. How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown? Brutus. How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport that now on Pompey's basis lies along no worthier than the dust? Cassius. So oft as that shall be so often shall the not of us be called the men who gave their country liberty. That's not what you should be doing after you just killed the most important man in Rome and the city is unsecured. You shouldn't be daydreaming about all the plays that are gonna be put on your honor. You should be securing the city. So Brutus fails because he's too caught up in playing Lucius Brutus. It limited the scope of his political flexibility. It colored his interpretation of events. It misaligned his priorities and it dulled his ability to read the world. And I'm gonna make the exact same claim about the second character we're gonna investigate. That's Caesar. Okay, so we're gonna move on from analysis of Brutus to analysis of Caesar. Caesar also fails because he's too caught up in playing Caesar. Just like Brutus, Caesar has constructed this image of himself that he's aspiring to. An ideal that he both wants posterity and others and also himself to believe that he is. And the ideal that Caesar aspires to, Shakespeare uses a single word to really capture. Constancy. Being constant. It's being a sovereign. It's being self-sufficient. It's being almost a metaphysical entity that everything and everyone revolves around. Caesar didn't want to just be another strong man. He wanted to almost be more than man. Okay, so this is how wrong Brutus was. Not only did he have monarchical ambitions, he almost had ambitions to be a god. But because of this, Caesar ignored many, many, many clear signs that the assassination was coming. Which ended in his demise. Caesar missed many, many chances for safety and dismissed numerous clear and bad omens that something is about to go down. Okay, so some of the omens. The dead have climbed up from their graves. Lionesses are seen whelping in the city. Fiery warriors are seen fighting in the clouds. Owls are hooting in broad daylight. Ghosts are appearing in the streets. A sacrificial animal is seen without a heart. His wife is literally having dreams of him getting killed. Okay, it doesn't get more clear than this as far as omens go. Something really bad is going to go down, but Caesar ignored all of it. Now, I want to take a step back here and discuss what we as modern readers should take and should make of these omens. I mean, the first thought is, well, this is clearly Shakespeare's edition, right? This is not an historical source. I mean, some of them are his edition, but not the really important ones. Shakespeare does make some changes as we saw from historical sources. But surprisingly, most of the dramatic moments of this play, including many of the most important omens, are also found in historical sources. Okay, so all this is in the historical sources. Sacrificial animal without a heart. His wife's dream. Brutus seeing ghosts. Crowd killing the wrong sinner. Caesar dying at Pompey's statue. Caesar rejecting the crown. Okay, here's the even crazier thing. When you put this play next to the historical source, the historical source seems much more dramatized than the play. Now, here's just one example. So again, in this funeral oration that I keep bringing up, Shakespeare just gives us two guys, Brutus and Antony talking. In one of the sources, Antony stages this elaborate theatrical display. Antony hires an actor to play Caesar. Antony creates a massive wax statue showing all the stab wounds of Caesar. Antony creates a system of pulleys to hoist the statue up and rotate it around above the crowd. The history is more dramatic than the play. This world historic event itself is so rich, Shakespeare almost needs to de-dramatize so that you're not overwhelmed. Okay, but the historical sources, I mean, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, they're biased, they don't have all the information, and they're clearly superstitious by believing in all these omens, right? Well, personally, I think it's a very plausible hypothesis that the cosmological world mirrors the political world, that's what omens are, in a way that the modern scientific mind fails to appreciate. But even if you think all this is superstition, I would wager that you still need to pay attention to omens, or more specifically, what other people think of omens. Because how other people interpret the world is going to tell you something very deep about their psyche. How Caesar interprets these omens is going to be deeply revealing about who he is. If your wife is having dreams that you're getting killed, if everyone, all your friends are seeing ghosts, at the very least, that tells you something about the fear that they're in and the political situation. So pay attention to omens. They tell you about the will of the gods, or at the very least, the minds of men. Back to the play. Now, given all these omens, in the morning of the Ides of March, right? This is the day when Caesar is about to get assassinated. Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, begs him not to go. So they're at his home right now. Caesar sends for signs from an augur. An augur is someone who observes the natural world, mostly birds, and tries to divine the will of the gods. This is what the augur comes back with. What say the augurs? Servant, they would not have you to stir forth today, plucking the entrails of an offering forth. They could not find a heart within the beast. This is that sacrificial animal without a heart I was telling you about. Caesar, the gods do this in shame of cowardice. Caesar should be a beast without a heart if he should stay at home today for fear. No, Caesar shall not. 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, and Caesar shall go forth. So they find a sacrificial animal without a heart. And Caesar's interpretation is that the gods are mocking me. They're saying, I don't have a heart if I don't go to the senate, and that I am more dangerous than danger itself. Okay, now I'm no augur, but that doesn't seem like the right interpretation. In fact, his interpretation sounds so comical, it reminded me of those Chuck Norris memes. You know what I'm talking about? We're like, the flu needs to get Chuck Norris shots every year. Or like, death once had a near Chuck Norris experience. That's what Caesar's self-conception is kind of like. So Caesar goes against the interpretations of his own augur because the ideal of Caesar that he's trying to live up to is someone who has no fear, right? Caesar is more dangerous than danger itself. Caesar is adamant of going to the senate. His wife's pleas initially do not work, but clearly Calpurnia has been dealing with Caesar for a long time. And so she finds a way to get him to stay, and this is how she does it. Call it my fear that keeps you in the house and not your own. What Calpurnia did is very clever. When you're dealing with someone with a big ego, it's often best to work around their sort of self-conceived grandiosity. And that's exactly what Calpurnia does here. She disentangles Caesar not going in the senate from his own self-conception. And lo and behold, Caesar stays. So Caesar decides not to go. The assassins learn of this, and they can't have that. And so the assassins send Decius, okay, a fellow conspirator and would-be assassin to try to lure him into the senate house. So Decius comes to Caesar's house, and he asks, we're all waiting for you. Why haven't you come? And this is that dialogue. Calpurnia here, my wife, this is Caesar speaking, stays me at home. She dreamt tonight she saw my statue, which like a fountain with a hundred spouts did run pure blood. And many lusty Romans came smiling and did bathe their hands in it. And these she does apply for warnings and portents and evils imminent. And on her knee hath begged that I will stay at home today. Decius, this dream is all a misinterpreted. It was a vision fair and fortunate. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes in which so many smiling Romans bathed signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood. And that great men shall press for tinctures, stains, relics, and cognizance. This by Calpurnia's dreams is signified. Caesar, and this way have you well expounded it. How foolish do your fears see now, Calpurnia. I'm ashamed I did yield to them. Give me my robe, for I will go. So Calpurnia's dream is that Caesar's statue has blood spewing all out of it. That villainous Romans are bathing themselves and smiling because Caesar's dead. And Decius says that's not what it means at all. What this means is that your blood, your vitality, your vigor will be the fountainhead of Rome. And those villainous Romans, no, no, they're great men coming to pay homage. They're here to collect relics from your statue. That's what this dream really means. Again, I'm no dream interpreter, but I think Calpurnia's interpretation makes a lot more sense than Decius's. But Caesar goes with Decius's because Decius's is more flattering. Okay, so what is the nature of flattery? I'm going to let Decius tell you in his own words. So what I'm going to read to you now is Decius reassuring the conspirators that he will successfully bring Caesar here. Okay, so this is right before what I just read you. Decius, never fear that. If he be so resolved, I can oversway him, for he loves to hear that unicorns may be betrayed with trees and bear with glasses, elephants with holes, lions with toils, and men with flatterers. But when I tell him he hates flatterers, he says he does, being then most flattered. Let me work, for I can give his humor the true bent, and I will bring him to the capital. So all of those examples are legendary ways to catch a powerful beast. For a unicorn, you stand in front of a tree, let it charge at you, you dodge at the very last minute, and it gets its horn stuck in a tree. Don't try this at home. For a bear, apparently, I don't know if this works, you use a mirror to dazzle them. For an elephant, this is more likely, you dig a hole, it's a pitfall. For a lion, you use a net. Okay, so what a net is to a lion, what a hole is to an elephant, what a mirror is to a bear, what a tree is to a unicorn, flattery is to man. Flattery is how you bring down a beast of a man, a beast of a man, someone with a grandiose self-conception, and you do so by appealing none other than to their self-conception. Caesar's ego, then, is his fatal weakness. It's like the unicorn's horn that gets stuck in the tree, because we see how both Calpurnia and Decius are able to sway him so easily. So here's the real irony. Caesar's self-conception of constancy actually makes him very easily manipulated. So Caesar goes to the Senate House, and he has one last opportunity to be saved. One of his friends has learned of the assassination. But the issue is, Caesar's going to the Senate House with Decius, with other assassins, so it's not like his friend can just shout it or drag him out. His friend writes in a note trying to tell Caesar about the assassination and waits in front of the Senate House to give it to Caesar. This is their exchange. Hail Caesar, read this schedule. O Caesar, read mine first, for mine's a suit that touches Caesar nearer. Read it, great Caesar. Caesar, what touches us ourself shall be last served. And he doesn't read it. So Caesar dismisses the note because his self-conception is that he's someone so powerful and so constant that he can afford to show his power by not being concerned with himself. So if you have an adult and a toddler in the same room, the adult is going to help the toddler before the adult helps himself. And that's kind of what Caesar is saying here, that I am so much more powerful than everyone else that I can afford not to care about that which is nearest to me. And in that line, I just find it very amusing. Not only does Caesar continue his bad habit of referring to himself in the third person, but he has to do it twice. Okay, so it's not what touches us shall be last served. It's not what touches ourself shall be last served. It's what touches us ourself shall be last served. Caesar enters the Senate House and the assassins strike. So it's Caesar playing this role of Caesar that doomed Caesar. And I think Shakespeare wants to highlight that Caesar is in fact playing a role, a role that is increasingly disjointed from reality by a clever device that Shakespeare uses repeatedly and repeatedly in this play. And that's whenever Caesar declares his own constancy, Shakespeare immediately contrasts that with his clear mortality and fragility. It's just a few examples. Caesar dares Cassius to swim with him in the Tiber, and then he almost drowns to death. Caesar is in Spain, the place of his many victories, and he suffers a seizure foaming at the mouth. Caesar receives a crown from Antony in Act I, he suffers another seizure. Caesar's greatest victory is over Pompey, and yet it is in front of Pompey's statue that he dies. Caesar declares that he has no fear, and immediately in the next line Shakespeare adds to Plutarch that Caesar's ear is deaf. So Shakespeare is always actively undermining Caesar's own declarations of constancy. But the most jarring contrast between Caesar's self-declared constancy and his objective mortality is how he died. So Caesar goes into the Senate house and the conspirators rush around. Now the conspirators, they need an excuse, right? Why are you all rushing the consul? So the conspirators pretend that they are asking for a pardon for one of the brothers of the conspirators, and the brother's name is Plubius Cimber. Cassius falls to the foot of Caesar, Brutus grabs Caesar's hand to kiss him, and this is how Caesar reacts to this plea, right? To pardon this senator's brother from exile. I could be well moved if I were as you. If I could pray to move, prayers would move me. Okay, this shows how Caesar's ambitions are more divine than monarchical, right? You don't pray to a king, you pray to a god. But Caesar goes even stronger. The entire Roman pantheon can be moved by prayers, and Caesar is saying that he cannot. This is the famous line, but I am constant as the northern star of whose true fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament. Even Jupiter moves, even Pluto moves, even Venus moves in the night sky. Again, Caesar is aspiring to be something even greater than the Greek and the Roman pantheon, right? That northern star that holds its place. Caesar continues, the skies are painted with unnumbered sparks. They are all fire and everyone doth shine, but there's but one in all doth hold his place. So in the world, it is furnished well with men, and men are flesh and blood and apprehensive. Yet in the number I do know but one that unassailable holds on his rank, unashaked of motion, and that I am he. Let me a little show it even in this, that I was constant, simber should be banished, and constant do remain to keep him so. So Caesar is saying here that he's rejecting the plea for the pardon because he's constant, he's made his decision, and he's constant and sticks to that decision. And just as Caesar declares his ultimate constancy, more than a god, more than Venus, more than Jupiter, he's assassinated. So by placing clear instances of Caesar's objective mortality with his subjective self-declared constancy, Shakespeare is making it evident to us, just as in the case with Brutus, that Caesar is playing a character in his head that's disjointed from reality. And Caesar keeps on playing this character, even in his final words. Caesar sees Brutus, Brutus is the last one to stab Caesar. Caesar sees Brutus coming, and then he utters those immortal words, et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar. When I read that, I had to do a double take, that then fall Caesar was not a stage direction. It's not. Caesar narrates his own fall. He's saying, he's saying, if even you, my loving friend and son, Brutus are here to kill me, then let Caesar die. Again, referring himself to the third person. Okay, so both Brutus and Caesar show the tragic consequences of painting an ideal of oneself in one's own head that is disjointed from reality, but then fully committing to it as if it were reality. And I think that's a good reminder for us to examine the stories and narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves. But before you reject this idea of living theatrically, of aspiring to an ideal, I'm now going to argue for the exact opposite case. I'm going to argue that at least in the case of Caesar, his self-deception, his delusion is also the cause of his success. So let me just give you a few examples from his life. When Caesar was 25, he was captured by pirates. The man did not behave like a captive at all. He bossed around the pirates. At night, he shushed the pirates so he could sleep. In the morning, he forced the pirates to listen to his poetry. And when they didn't like his poetry, he berated them for being illiterates. When the pirates told him that his ransom was 20 talents, he laughed out loud and he demanded that it be increased to 50 talents. And then he told them directly to his face that he will crucify them. If they release him. He's released. And even though he isn't a naval commander, somehow raises a fleet and crucifies the pirates. That gives you an idea of who young Caesar was. And as he matured, this type of arrogance, this type of willingness to disobey all convention resulted in absolute brilliance in the battlefield. And the best example of this must be the Battle of Alesia. So the Battle of Alesia is one of Caesar's most famous battles. And it's against the Gallic leader, Vercingetorix. Okay, so Vercingetorix united most of the Gallic tribes against Rome. Massive threat. And Caesar is pursuing Vercingetorix in this battle deep into enemy territory. Vercingetorix severely outnumbers Caesar. Vercingetorix retreats on top of a hill in Alesia. So a strategic high ground. And to make matters worse, Vercingetorix sends a call for even more reinforcements. Okay, so he said, Caesar has every military disadvantage against him. Any normal reasonable commander would retreat and regroup. But what Caesar does is Caesar, with a lot less men, builds a fort, fortifications, around Alesia to trap Vercingetorix inside to starve him out. Okay, but what do you do with the reinforcements? This is 11 miles, by the way. Caesar builds another set of fortifications around himself again to defend against the reinforcements. So Caesar built a donut fort that eventually successfully both repelled the reinforcements and also captured Vercingetorix with a fraction of men, right? And, you know, I can assure you that you're going to find that in any military textbook. Let me give you one last example. It has to do with political life. So Caesar implemented the famous calendar reforms, right? This is why July is named after him and why August is named after his adopted son, Augustus. Now, before Caesar implemented this, the calendar had 355 days. Okay, that's not how many days that a year has. In fact, it has 10 days less. And so this gave the pontifics maximus, the high priest, a lot of power because it was the pontifics maximus that would decide where to put back those 10 days. So the pontifics maximus could extend the office of a specific council, for example. And it's not like people didn't know this. Everyone knew that the calendar and the real year were destroyed. But only Caesar had the guts, he had the courage, he had the tenacity to say, screw convention, I'm gonna do what is right. And it was by no means an easy reform. There's a lot of political, there's a lot of cultural, there's a lot of religious inertia. But he did it and it was a great thing. So I hope you can see how the same overconfidence, the same willingness to ignore all signs of the contrary also led to Caesar's incredible rise. And under that backdrop, can we really blame him? If your entire life you've done impossible feet after impossible feet, when everything and everyone tells you the contrary, can we really blame him if he ignores a few omens in his wife's bad dreams? So as much as Caesar playing Caesar, doomed Caesar, Caesar playing Caesar is also what made Caesar. But now I want to push this reading even further. I want to argue that Caesar playing Caesar did not doom Caesar, that it got him exactly what he wanted. I want to make the argument that Caesar is as constant as the North Star. After all, Caesar succeeded in ending the Republic and building the Roman Empire through his adopted son, Caesar Augustus. Even Brutus admits that Caesar's spirit lives on after he's dead and is what Brutus thinks is defeating him in the end. Caesar, the word, became a noun, OK? It wasn't just the name of an individual ruler. It became a category defining class of all rulers, rulers in Europe have to pay homage to Caesar, often explicitly by bearing the name Caesar or Kaiser. Even this book, it's not called Marcus Brutus. It's called Julius Caesar, even if Caesar has, I think, a quarter of the lines that Brutus has. And look at us. We're laughing about the guy. We're mocking him for almost drowning, for having a seizure. But he still captivates our attention. 2,000 years later, as much as he did in his own time. He's still as constant of a cultural North Star today as he was back in Rome. So how do we make sense of these two readings? On this reading, Caesar is as constant as the North Star. On the previous reading, he's the most fragile and mortal man in entire play. We can resolve this antinomy, I think, by drawing out the distinction between Caesar the man and Caesar the spirit. Caesar the man is weak, mortal, fragile. But Caesar the spirit is indeed constant. And to further help you explore and understand this distinction, I'm going to bring in a pretty fringe reading of this play from the secondary literature that claimed that not only did Caesar know about the assassination, he actively goaded it and he actively wanted to die. Okay, obvious question is why? Why on earth would Caesar actually want to die? Well, this reading claims that Caesar wanted to be more than just a king, right? He wanted to be essentially a god. His goal was not just to elevate Caesar the man into a monarch, but to immortalize Caesarianism, right? The spirit that he stood for. And because Caesar had accomplished so much already in his life, the only way to climb that next rung of prestige is if he became a martyr. So this reading claims Caesar himself sacrifices the man in order to elevate the spirit. Okay, I don't think this reading works for reasons I won't get into, but I'll leave the book, which is very interesting, in the description if you want to read it for yourself. But regardless, this reading highlighted three, I think, crucial intuitions for me. The first is that there's a distinction between Caesar the man and Caesar the spirit, and Caesar clearly prefers the latter. The second is that Caesar as man is fragile, but Caesar as spirit is constant. And the third is that his spirit was only made constant by the demise of his body. And so here's the crucial insight. Whether Caesar wanted or not, the assassination helped Caesar achieve his goal of constancy. And I think it's no coincidence that the three founding fathers of the West, Socrates, the intellectual father, Caesar, the political father, Christ, the religious father, were all, in some sense, martyrs. When you want to have that kind of cultural influence, going out in a spectacular way is almost a necessity. And so the irony is, it was the conspirators themselves who made Caesar so constant. I quote you, Brutus. This is before he kills Caesar. We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar. And in the spirit of men, there is no blood. Oh, that we then could come by Caesar's spirit and not dismember Caesar. What Brutus is saying is Caesar the man. He really loves him. It's his father figure. It's his friend. But Caesar, the spirit, what he stands for, imperialism, monarchy, that is diametrically opposed to the Roman Republic. And so Brutus is saying, if only there was a way for us to kill the Caesarian spirit, but leave the man, his friend, and father figure intact. But of course, Brutus accomplishes the exact opposite. Brutus, by killing Caesar the man, through his very own actions, immortalized Caesar the spirit and brought about the downfall of the very Republic he was trying to protect. And so here's the real irony. Decius's interpretation of the dream, the flattering interpretation, turned out to be the right interpretation. That Caesar's carcass and the blood that would spew forth from it would give rise and vitalize Rome. I quote you Decius again. Your statue spouting blood in many pipes in which so many smiling Romans bathed signifies that from you great Rome shall suck reviving blood. And I think it's absolutely poetic that Shakespeare puts into Brutus's mouth almost immediately after the assassination, almost word for word, Decius's interpretation of the dream. So Brutus unknowingly satisfies and completes Decius's interpretation of the dream. I quote you Brutus. Stoop, Roman, stoop, and let us bathe our hands in Caesar's blood up to the elbows and besmear our swords. Then walk we forth even to the marketplace and waving our red weapons over our heads, let's all cry peace, freedom, and liberty. Of course, it's neither peace nor liberty that Brutus brings about, but civil war and empire. Now another way of saying spirit, right, is the ideal that Caesar erected for himself of that role that Caesar was playing. And so in the same stroke that Shakespeare reminds us of the comical failures of living life as if when we're on a stage, he also reminds us of its tremendous power, its civilizational grounding power. For as much as Caesar the man accomplished in his life, Caesar the spirit accomplished infinitely more. This here is the duality of appearance, its tremendous power, and its tremendous danger that Shakespeare himself would have only known too well as both actor and playwright. All right, so that's Caesar, and we're going to analyze one last major character and one last scene, and that's Mark Antony and his famous funeral oration, which occurs immediately after in Act III, the assassination. So at this point of the plot, Brutus has decided to spare Antony and being the genius that he is, he's also decided to give Antony a chance to speak in the funeral oration. And so partially this is because Antony put on a great display and convinced the conspirators that he was harmless, and partially this just goes to Brutus's overemphasis on appearance that he wants to seem generous to the people of not only not killing Antony, but letting him speak. So at the start of the funeral, Caesar is dead. They bring his body to the open air and Rome is still in shock. So Brutus is in a very difficult spot here because the mob, as we just saw, they love Caesar and the mob can get violent very quickly and uncontrollably. So Brutus really needs to have his speech, turn the mob to his side. Brutus gives his speech why he killed Caesar and the mob loves it, but not because it's a good speech. In fact, it's a very bad speech. I'm going to read you part of it. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead to live all freemen? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoiced at it. As he was valiant, I honor him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him. Brutus is still struggling to come up with concrete examples of what Caesar has done wrong. Okay, so he's still caught up in the abstract realm of philosophy, of reason, of what a Roman is, of what liberty is. It's a speech that would have bored Cicero to sleep, let alone the plebeians. The mob love Brutus' speech only really because he's Brutus and the mob is extremely fickle, right? They would at this point follow anyone who's making half sense. But regardless of why the mob turned, now Antony, who needs to give his own funeral oration, is in a really tough spot. And he's surrounded on both sides. But fortunately, Antony has been in such a situation before. Remember the battle of Alesia I was telling you about? Antony was in that battle. Antony was one of the heroes of that battle. And now Antony has found himself in his own Alesia, sandwiched in between a mob that has turned on him and a group of conspirators that would have killed him already if it weren't for the moderation of Brutus. Antony really needs to have his speech win the crowd to his side. But not like being in that donut fort with Caesar. Antony's ability to maneuver is extremely limited because he can't openly criticize the conspirators who are still in charge at this point. The conspirators still control violence at this stage. And so they could silence him if he starts openly going against them. The conspirators gave Antony leave to speak only on the conditions that he would not speak ill of them. And I think it's precisely this boundedness, this limitation, is what makes Antony's speech here one of the greatest in all of Shakespeare. It's precisely because of the tricky situation that he's found himself in that brings out incredible rhetorical finesse. Okay, so here again is the challenge. How can Antony turn the mob on the conspirators while having plausible deniability? This is his speech. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your years. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious. If it were so, it was a grievous fault and grievously hath Caesar answered it. Here under leave of Brutus and the rest, for Brutus is an honorable man, so are they all, all honorable men, come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me. But Brutus says he was ambitious and Brutus is an honorable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome whose ransoms did the general coffers fill. Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept, ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious and Brutus is an honorable man. You all did see that on the Lupercal I thrice presented him with a kingly crown, which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious and sure, he's an honorable man. I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause. What cause withhold you then to mourn for him? O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason. Bear with me. My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar and I must pause till it come back to me. If Brutus speaks to people's reason, Antony speaks to their emotions. And the way he does that is by feigning his own, that he can't even continue without taking a break. And he also does that by berating the crowd. Why aren't all of you who I know love Caesar? Why aren't you mourning? Right? So Antony is already starting to fan the flames of emotion. Antony begins his rhetorical strategy by trying to meet the people where they are. Brutus is an honorable man. But he repeats that disingenuously so many times that honorable not only starts losing its meaning, it starts meaning an insult. Right? But this is what's critical. It's an insult that always has plausible deniability. Hey, I called you an honorable man. So the next thing that Antony does is to bring up Caesar's will and then immediately pretend that he brought it up by mistake. Quote to you, Antony. But here's a parchment with the seal of Caesar. I found it in his closet. Tis his will. Let but the commons hear this testament, which pardon me, I do not mean to read, and they would go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds and dip their napkins in his sacred blood. Yeah, beg a hair of him for memory and dying mention it within their wills, bequeathing it as a rich legacy unto their issue. Plebeians. We'll hear the will. Read it, Mark Antony. The will, the will. We will hear Caesar's will. Antony. Have patience, gentle friends. I must not read it. It's not meat. You know how Caesar loved you. 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. Tis good you know not that you are his heirs. For if you should, a war would have come of it. Plebeian. Read the will. We'll hear it, Antony. You shall read us the will, Caesar's will. Antony. Will you be patient? Will you stay a while? I've overshot myself to tell you of it. I fear I wrong the honorable men whose daggers have stabbed Caesar. I do fear it. Plebeians. They were traitors, honorable men. The will, the testament. They were villains, murderers. The will. Read the will. Antony. You will compel me then to read the will? Then make a ring about the corpse of Caesar and let me show you him that made the will. Shall I descend and will you give me leave? Plebeians. Come down, descend. You shall have leave. The next strategy that Antony uses is to give the crowd the illusion of agency. Antony manages to make it seem as if it was the crowd who was urging him to read the will. As if it was the crowd who was begging him to come down next to Caesar's corpse. And this serves at least two important functions. One, again, it's plausible deniability. Hey, I didn't want to read the will but you heard what the crowd was like. I had to read the will. But the second thing is that Antony wants to show himself to be a man of the people. Someone who is very sensitive, right? To the consent of the general will. Let's not forget Caesar and Antony were part of the populist party, right? Essentially the progressive party. The party for the little guy. And here Antony abuses that masterfully. The next thing Antony does is he picks up Caesar's bloodstained clothes and he says, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle, his clothes. I remember the first time ever Caesar put it on. It was on a summer's evening in his tent. That day he overcame the Nervi. Look in this place Rancassius dagger through. See what a rent that envious Casca made. Through this, the well-beloved Brutistan. He's pointing to all the holes in the clothes. And as he plucked his cursed steel away, mark how the blood of Caesar followed it. As rushing out of doors to be resolved, if Brutus so unkindly knocked or no. For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel. Judge, oh you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him. This was the most unkindest cut of all. For when the noble Caesar saw him stab in gratitude more strong than traitor's arms, quite vanquished him. Then burst his mighty heart. Now, Antony may pretend to be a man of the people, but in this part of the speech, he's showing he's not so much the people's champion as their manipulator. Now before in the speech, we've already seen Antony feign emotions. We've already seen him with his rhetorical tricks. But here he explicitly lies. Caesar's clothes that he made such a big fuss about. The first time Caesar putting it on, the battle of the Nervi. Antony wasn't there. And Antony surely wasn't there when Brutus stabbed Caesar to see Caesar's reaction. And of course, how could Antony know which hole, which conspirator stabbed? Antony is a pathological liar. He's cynical. He's realpolitik. And that point is driven home, not just in this scene, but in act four. In act four, Antony talks behind the back of his ally, Lepidus, and calls him a load-bearing ass, a load-bearing donkey, okay? Antony endeavors to roll back the privileges and gifts to the people that he makes in this speech. And Antony even callously calls for the death of his own family members, trading lies between his allies. That's who Antony is. I do find it quite notable that the two leaders of the populist party, again, the party of the people, one is a tyrant, Caesar. Another is a realpolitik, cynical operator. And I think it's so often the case in history that it's precisely the dictator who champions the cause of the people, whether that's Stalin, Caesar, Napoleon. And I think that's quite counterintuitive because we often think, right, class warfare, it's the haves versus the have-nots. But more often than not, it's the haves versus the tyrants plus the have-nots. Because the tyrants needs to find a political force to dispose of the old order. And so they need the help of the disenfranchised. But of course, as soon as the tyrant gains power, he brushes the disenfranchised away. So what appear to be, often in history, grassroots movements are often just pawns in elite conflict, the top and the bottom attacking the middle. And that's exactly what you see here with Antony and the crowd. So at this point, Antony is gonna start concluding his speech. And this is what he says. Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny. They that have done this deed are honorable. What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, that made them do it, they are wise and honorable and will no doubt with reasons answer you. I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts. I am no orator, as Brutus is. But as you know me all, a plain blunt man that loved my friend and that they know full well that gave me public leave to speak of him. For I have neither wit nor words nor worth action or utterance nor the power of speech to stir men's blood. I only speak right on. I tell you that which you yourself do know, show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor, poor dumb mouths and bid them speak for me. But were I Brutus and Brutus Antony, there were an Antony would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue in every wound of Caesar that should move the stones of Rome to rise a mutiny. Antony ends his speech by using all the different rhetorical techniques that we described. His plausible deniability, I'm not telling you to mutiny, but if Brutus were in my shoes, he'd tell you to mutiny. Antony appears to be a man of the people, right? I'm no fancy trained orator like Brutus. Of course, Antony is the best orator. But the most important thing he does here is that he emphasizes friendship over citizenship. Antony knows friendship, allegiance to individuals in this late Republican period are a lot more important than this abstract ideal of citizenship. This is why Antony calls the crowd friends so much. This is why Antony focuses on the friendship that is betrayed between Brutus and Caesar when Brutus assassinated him. And this is also why Antony begins his speech by inverting the order of Brutus' beginning and chose what their emphasis are. Brutus, it's abstract ideals, citizenship. Antony, it's friendship. So this is how Brutus begins his speech, how he dresses the crowd. Romans, countrymen, friends. First is Roman, then is abstract notion of the citizen, and only last is concrete friends. But Antony inverts that and says, Friends, Romans, countrymen, right? So friendship is a lot more important. Allegiance to individuals, individual strongmen in the late Republican period is a lot more important than abstract notions of citizenship. At this point, the crowd are already in the frenzy. They're already going to burn Brutus' house down. Antony gives them one final shove by reading Caesar's will. Here's the will, an under Caesar's seal, to every Roman citizen he gives, to every several man, 75 drachmas. Moreover, he has left you all his walks, his private arbors, and new planted orchards on this side Tiber. He has left them you and to your heirs forever, common pleasures to walk abroad and recreate yourselves. Here was a Caesar, when comes such another? Crowd goes wild. They pillage the city, hunting for conspirators, and Brutus and Cassius are forced to flee Rome. So that's Antony's major scene. And now I want to take a step back and discuss who Antony is, what this scene reveals about him. Antony, at least when compared to Brutus or Caesar, is not really caught up in some kind of grandiose image of himself. Antony is kind of a brute, okay? He likes women, he likes killing, he likes sex, he likes drinking. He's a soldier's soldier. Antony is the major character who's not living life as if he were on a stage. But paradoxically, that makes him the best actor of them all. Let me repeat this. Antony is the best actor. He's the ultimate actor in this play. He gives the two best performances. First, he gives the best performance. He tricks the conspirators into thinking he's harmless by pretending to be their friend. And second, he maneuvers a hostile crowd right under the noses of the conspirators with the rhetoric, with lies, with feigned emotions. I don't think Brutus would have been able to accomplish either of that. Brutus is too proud to use such tactics, and he's too full of himself to put on another mask. So this is the key insight here. The only major character not living life as if he were on stage is the best actor of them all because he knows that he's an actor. Brutus and Caesar don't know that they're actors. They've fully committed to their roles. In other words, Antony is only so good at deceiving others because he's not deceiving himself. And it's precisely because of this political flexibility that Antony, at least in this play, comes out as the victor. Now, I need to be clear here. I don't want you to think that the takeaway from Shakespeare is be like Antony because for one, we see that Antony is utterly ruthless, right? He has no moral boundaries because he doesn't really hold himself up to much of a moral standard. For another, remember, fully committing to an ideal is deeply powerful, and it's a power that Antony does not have. Today, there's still people who look up to Brutus. There's still people who looked up to Caesar. There's Ciceronians. There's Catoians. There's no Antinoians because Antony doesn't really stand for anything. What Shakespeare is giving us here in Antony, Brutus, and Caesar, I think are characters on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Antony, barely motivated by any higher ideals at all. Brutus and Caesar, way too caught up in their own ideals. And I think both of these extremes are clearly painted as undesirable, even if they're uniquely powerful in their own ways. Okay, the obvious question is, what is the positive ideal? Should we live life as if we were on a stage? I don't think any major characters in this play give us a positive vision, but I think that the way they have erred gives us a major clue of what's needed. None of the major characters in this play have any healthy friendships they can confide in. Okay, so Brutus has lied to his friend Cassius with deceitful letters, and he's also alienated from his wife. Caesar's marriage, we just saw a little bit of it, is barely any better than Brutus' marriage. And of course, Caesar's friends end up killing him. Antony, I don't have to say this, is the worst of them all, right? He treats his friends, his allies, his family members with little respect. So one way I think we can understand the failure of all these characters is that they don't leave room for others. Antony doesn't leave room because he doesn't hold himself up to any moral ideal. And Brutus and Caesar don't leave room because they've so fully committed to these unchangeable ideals that they won't listen to the suggestions and the real needs of others. Therefore, I think what must be part of the puzzle of a positive solution is aspiring to some kind of ideal that's inherently relational and social and that responds to the changing needs and wants of others. Here's what I mean. I mean, in this play, we see people managing their spouses. We don't see any loving relationships. We see a man as constant as the North Star, but we don't see someone who's willing to heed advice. We see a heroic liberator, but we don't see a leader who's willing to adapt his strategy into the times. So I think that's the positive lesson, that we should aspire and commit to ideals, but ones that are inherently social and therefore subject to change. Okay, there's one last thread that I want to pursue today. That will also take us to the end of the plot and that's the fall of Brutus. So after Caesar's assassination in Act Three, Brutus and Cassius, after the funeral orations, they're chased out of Rome and they raise up an army and their army and Antony and Octavian's army confront each other. That's the Act Four and Five. So the situation gets worse and worse for Brutus and under the pressure cooker, Brutus' true motivations really, really come out. Brutus starts behaving in an increasingly Caesarian fashion and the dominant image of the last two acts are of Brutus becoming more and more like Caesar. So let me give you a few examples. Remember that line, if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they do no less. Brutus basically says the same thing when he tries to explain to Antony why he killed Caesar. Our reasons are so full of good regard that were you Antony, the son of Caesar, you should be satisfied. Brutus starts emphasizing his own constancy when he quarrels with Cassius. There's no terror, Cassius, in your threats for I am armed so strong in honesty that they pass by me as the idle wind, which I respect not. Brutus also starts referring himself in the third person. When Marcus Brutus grows so covetous to lock such rascal counters from his friends, be ready, gods, with all your thunderbolts, dash him to pieces. Caesar's ghost is going to come up in act four to taunt Brutus and Brutus is going to ask what it is and Caesar's ghost replies, thy evil spirit. I'm your evil spirit. Symbolizing that Brutus adopted the very Caesarian spirit that he wanted to destroy. And to really show just how entwined these two characters have become, Shakespeare has them utter each other's names as their final words. So just as the last words in Caesar's mouth were about Brutus et tu Brute, the last words from Brutus's mouth are about Caesar. So Brutus's armies at the end of act five are defeated. He's about to commit suicide with the very dagger that he killed Caesar with. And he says, Caesar, now be still. I killed not thee with half so good a will. By the end of the play, Brutus and Caesar have become twins. Of course, it's not so much that the pressure got to Brutus. The pressure simply revealed who Brutus always was. Brutus's motivations were always more Caesarian than he liked to admit. So that's Shakespeare's Caesar. But what about that question that we started this lecture with? Will America fall like Rome? I don't think Julius Caesar gives us an answer as much as a method to come about and answer ourselves. And that method is by closely observing the revealed values and habits of the people. In the case of Rome, that's depicted in this play at least, it's clear that the Republic could not stand because the people had lost their taste for liberty. And that's not something you can change overnight. So what Shakespeare is also reminding us is to be aware of the limitations of political possibility, to not exaggerate our own political agency, and to go with the current of the times and not against it. And I think Shakespeare does this in a very masterful way in a very clever speech of Cassius', which is the last speech we're going to analyze today. So the context around this speech is back all the way in Act One, at the very beginning of the play, Brutus is still deliberating what he should do. Should I kill Caesar or not? And Cassius is trying to convince him that they have agency, that they can change, that the ascendancy of Caesar and the fall of Rome is not inevitable. I quote to you Cassius, Why man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. What Cassius is trying to say here is that there is a real possibility to save the Republic. That phrase, fault in our stars, refers to horoscopes, right, astrology. The idea that the day and the time and the alignment of the planets when you were born will strongly determine your fate. And Cassius is saying, no, the fault is not in our stars. We are not fated to do things, but in ourselves, we have agency. But in Cassius's very utterance, the fault is not in our stars. He shows he has a lot less political agency than he thinks. Why is that? It's because the rise of horoscopes in astrology resulted from the very decay of Roman values that made the fall of the Republic inevitable. So divination was always incredibly important in the Roman Republic. But in the early and mid Republic, when the Republic was healthy, what were popular were things like augury. Okay, augury, like interpreting the will of the gods through birds. Augury portends to the fate of the entire polis and not just a lone individual. So astrology and horoscopes arose precisely in the late Republican period, alongside those individual strongmen who became increasingly concerned about their own fate. Astrology is individualistic. Everyone has their own chart. And so the rise of astrology represented a decline of concern for the polis and increasing concern of strongmen for themselves. Even the subtle change in the methods of divination showed that the Republic was in decline. So the very fact that Cassius had to say that the fault is not in our stars showed how popular astrology had already become, which showed how far Roman values have already decayed, which shows how difficult it is properly restore the Republic. Certainly more difficult than just killing Caesar. The very statement it was not in our stars showed that it probably was in their stars. Julius Caesar then gives us a way to diagnose our own situation, to figure out what is the realm of the possible in our own time by closely observing the revealed, not stated, preferences, values, habits, mores of fellow Americans, and to see whether they are still compatible with the Republican spirit. For example, as you may know today, horoscopes and astrology are on the rise again. And perhaps that's also reflective of a bourgeois individualism, an exaggerated self-obsession and a disconcern for the country at large. You may say then that even though I don't believe in the omens of astrology, I find the rise of astrology to be a very bad omen. If we do conclude that Republican values no longer animate us, let's not ignore the writings on the wall like Cassius. Let's not indulge ourselves in a doomed imitation of the past like Brutus, but instead look to the future with an open mind. What Brutus should have replied to Cassius with is this. Yes, my dear Cassius, sometimes men are the masters of their fates, but sometimes men are the slaves of history. Sometimes the fault really is in our stars. Thank you. Thanks for watching my lecture. If you want to go even deeper into these ideas, then join my email list at greatbooks.io. You'll not only get lectures and interviews, but also transcripts, book summaries, and essays, all to help you explore the most important books in history. Now, I have two paths for you to continue your study. If you want to know more about Shakespeare, then check out my interview with Professor Stephen Greenblatt on the sources of Shakespeare's genius. If you want to know more about Caesar, then check out my interview with Professor Katharina Volk on Caesar's intellectual life. You can find links to everything we discussed today in the description, as well as on my website, greatbooks.io. Thank you.