The earliest published version of Julius Caesar appeared in Shakespeare's posthumous first folio, printed in 1623. Its title page is shown here.

Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar commemorates one of the great turning points in the history of Western Civilization: the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire. Before the time of Caesar, Roman sovereignty had resided with the people and the Senate. After Caesar, power fell into the hands of a hereditary emperor. Shakespeare's play only presents a snapshot of one moment in this long period of transition. It is more poetry than history — but this is its virtue. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare asserts the power of words to mold minds and shape events. He makes language the real force behind history, casts oratory as its general, and crowns clever beguiling rhetoric as the true master of mankind.

Rome's true history is at times indistinguishable from its legends. According to the Roman historian Livy, the Roman Republic began in 509 BCE when the people of Rome revolted against King Tarquin the Proud and conferred authority upon an elected senate. Livy's stories and dates may only be myth, but it is clear that the SPQR — Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and the People of Rome — governed Rome for several centuries with no king. Then, in 49 BCE, the Roman general Julius Caesar led his troops into civil war against the Senate. As Caesar gained power, he prevailed upon the Senate to declare him dictator in perpetuity in 45 BCE. Very quickly, however, a band of senators began to plot Caesar's assassination, fearful that he might otherwise establish a new monarchy and dissolve their republic. On March 15, 44 BCE, as many as sixty conspirators led by Senators Gaius Cassius and Marcus Brutus attacked Caesar in the Theatre of Pompey, stabbing him 23 times. Although Caesar's dictatorship had ended, his murder provoked a new civil war that ultimately led to the end of the Roman Republic and the rise of a new imperial monarchy under Octavius, who became Emperor Caesar Augustus in 27 BCE. Monarchy remained the dominant form of government in Europe until the twentieth century.

The play Julius Caesar, written around 1599 CE, is a dramatization of the Roman Senate's conspiracy against Julius Caesar and the beginnings of the civil war unleashed by his death, culminating in the defeat of the assassins Cassius and Brutus.¹ Shakespeare based his play closely on the work of the Roman historian Plutarch, but he mixed tradition with poetic invention and contemporary English concerns. For Shakespeare, living in Elizabethan England, there was no such thing as a government without kings or queens. This certainly shaped the way Shakespeare viewed Rome's historic struggle between monarchy and republicanism. Julius Caesar was structured as a tragedy — the conspirators who hoped to maintain popular sovereignty by killing Caesar ultimately lost everything by their deed. The play was in part a warning of the chaos and conflict that could arise from the absence of strong leadership.

The most critical moments of Shakespeare's play take place in Act III, Scene 2 (read the text), shortly after Caesar's death. Rumors of the assassination had spread through Rome, and the scene opened upon a mass of citizens who had gathered in the forum awaiting more news. This crowd was addressed in turn by Marcus Brutus, one of the leading senators involved in the assassination, and Mark Antony, a fellow general and supporter of Caesar. As these men delivered their oratory, the people of Rome would decide on their reaction to Caesar's death and choose whether to support Brutus, the Senate and the Republic, or Antony, Caesar and tyranny.

Shakespeare depicted the "throng of citizens" in Julius Caesar as helpless to think for themselves in the face of the powerful language wielded by Brutus and Antony. The masses were convinced first by one speaker and then the other. In the end, the people made Antony and Caesar their heroes and Brutus their villain. Tyranny prevailed, and the scene appropriately closed with news of the arrival of Octavius ― the man who would become Emperor. In order to see why the citizens in Shakespeare's play ultimately chose to revolt against their own sovereignty, it is essential to examine the speeches of this scene and uncover the inner workings of their rhetorical magic.

This golden coin, minted in 42 BCE, bears a portrait of Marcus Brutus. The photograph is by CNG Coins. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 License via Wikimedia Commons

Brutus was the first speaker to take the platform. His task was simple. He had arrived directly from site of Caesar's assassination, and he had made no attempt to hide his involvement in the deed. In the previous scene, he had even bathed his hands in Caesar's blood so that he might walk forth and be recognized as one of the assassins. Now he needed to justify Caesar's death to the people of Rome. Brutus addressed his listeners directly with plain prose and offered them a succinct appeal to reason: "If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer,—Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." This was followed by a rhetorical question to the crowd: "Had you rather Caesar were living, and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?" The crowd was thus encouraged to consider the logical tenants of Brutus' argument for themselves.

The essence of Brutus' defense was that his patriotism triumphed over his friendship. He had killed Caesar to save Rome's republic. Brutus next employed a series of repetitive parallelisms to reinforce this point. He began each parallelism by attributing his own affection for Caesar to each of Caesar's virtues: love, fortune, and valor. He ended, however, with an antithesis: justifying his murder of Caesar by Caesar's vice, ambition. This was a clever tactic, for by juxtaposing Caesar's positive qualities against his vice, the vice seemed all the more egregious by contrast. Moreover, as Caesar's noble traits were heroically good, the audience was encouraged to see the contrasting fault in opposite terms, as villainously evil.

Brutus next offered a set of parallel questions directly to his listeners: "Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended." Once again, Brutus had used direct, forceful language to prompt each listener to examine the logical merit of his perspective.

As Brutus continued to speak, Mark Antony entered the scene with the bloodstained body of Caesar. This dramatic interruption foreshadowed the way Antony would soon hijack the emotion of Caesar's death in his own speech. Presently, however, Brutus continued in his calm, rational demeanor. He acknowledged Mark Antony by announcing that although Antony had taken no part in Caesar's assassination, he, like all of Rome's citizens, would inherit Caesar's power as they joined together in a new commonwealth — a renewed republic. Brutus ended by saying, "as I slew my best lover for the good of Rome, I have the same dagger for myself, when it shall please my country to need my death."

The crowd responded to Brutus' mortal pledge with shouts of "Live!" His modest and rational remarks had succeeded in winning the minds of the masses, at least for the moment. "Bring him with triumph home unto his house," yelled one citizen, and another cried, "Let him be Caesar." Notably, despite all that Brutus had just said and done, the people still wanted a leader.

Mark Antony spoke next, but the crowd was at first unwilling to listen. Antony was a cousin and close supporter of Julius Caesar, and following Brutus' speech, the people were reluctant to heed the words of anyone defending the late dictator. Brutus, however, now urged the crowd to stay — his misplaced trust in Antony forms yet another layer in Shakespeare's drama — and the people grudgingly lent Antony their ears.

Antony could sense that public sentiment was against him. His first task in the famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech was to gain the trust of his audience. "I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him," he said, calming the crowd. Next he referenced the people's sudden hero, Brutus, and repeated what Brutus had claimed for his argument: that Caesar was slain for his ambition. Brutus, said Antony, was an honorable man. These words quickly won the confidence of the citizens.

Already, however, Antony was laying the foundation for a series of rhetorical tricks. "Brutus says he was ambitious," said Antony regarding Caesar, "and Brutus is an honourable man." By pairing these lines repeatedly during his speech, Antony was able to make the audience perceive them as a single unit. As a result, Antony could discredit the entire unit while only providing a contradiction to one of its two lines. Antony had no choice but to praise Brutus, for doing otherwise at this point would have drawn ire from the crowd. He could, however, make the people doubt Caesar's ambition, and because of the consistent pairing, this would lead the crowd to question Brutus' honor as well.

Arguing that Julius Caesar lacked ambition would be a difficult task. Caesar, after all, had only recently fought a civil war in order to become dictator. Antony nonetheless prevailed upon the citizens with a cunning juxtaposition of words and ideas. Earlier, when Brutus had spoken, he had described Caesar's ambition as a vice that contrasted with Caesar's virtues: love, fortune, and valor. These virtues, said Brutus, led to friendship, but the vice necessitated Caesar's death. Antony now surreptitiously broke down these distinctions between virtue and vice. "Brutus says he was ambitious," said Antony, beginning this motif, "and Brutus is an honourable man." Antony then recalled both the great wealth that Caesar's military campaigns had produced for the country and the sympathy that Caesar had felt for the poor. These were signs of the very love, fortune and valor that Brutus had praised in his own speech, but Antony ignored what Brutus had said in praise, simply repeating, "Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; and Brutus is an honourable man." Cleverly, Antony had intertwined the good and bad elements of Caesar's character by posing each virtue as a direct counterexample to his vice, rather than maintaining a distinct contrast between them as Brutus had done. Up to this point in the scene, Antony and Brutus had referenced essentially the same facts about Caesar, but each speaker had now used language to frame these facts for opposite ends.

Antony continued by reminding his audience that Caesar had recently refused the crown. "Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;" said Antony again, "and, sure, he is an honourable man." The citizens, however, were now skeptical of both Caesar's ambition and Brutus' honour. Antony now turned his praise of Brutus to sarcasm, but he still held back from overtly contesting Brutus' honor. Indeed, Antony would not speak ill of any of Caesar's assassins, but he nonetheless incited the crowd against them using a rhetorical device known as paralipsis. This means mentioning something in order to deny that it should be said. After Antony implied to the crowd that Caesar's ambition had been alleged falsely, he announced, "if I were disposed to stir your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, I should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong, who, you all know, are honourable men: I will not do them wrong." In this way, Antony led the crowd towards mutiny by introducing its possibility and then safely distancing himself from it. He was able to express his true desires by detailing precisely what he claimed he would hold back from saying. Antony next declared, "I rather choose to wrong the dead, to wrong myself, and you, than I will wrong such honourable men." Ultimately, it would not be Antony but a man in crowd who exclaimed, "They were traitors: honourable men!" Antony's rhetorical talent had persuaded the crowd to his own way of thinking even though Antony had never appeared, at the surface, to argue against his adversaries.

All of Antony's remarks were also interspersed with powerful appeals to the crowd's emotion, beginning when he posed a rhetorical question aimed not at making the audience think, but at making them feel: "You all did love him once, not without cause," he said of Caesar, "What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him?" Emotional pleas like this appear throughout Antony's speech. He continued, "Men have lost their reason!" Antony made no attempt, however, to use any reasoning to directly challenge Brutus' logic, for already he had said he did not intend to disprove Brutus' words. Instead he remarked, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me." The ensuing break in Antony's speech — a well known rhetorical device called by the Greeks aposiopesis — both emphasized the emotion of Caesar's death and provided the citizens a chance to let Antony's words sink into their hearts.

"The Death of Caesar," painted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1867.

When Antony resumed speaking, he revealed that he possessed Caesar's will. He hinted that Caesar had bequeathed something to the people which would make them "go and kiss dead Caesar's wounds." This elevated the crowd's excitement, but Antony refused to read them the will. Instead, he tantalized them with its prospects, relying once again on paralipsis to reveal the will's content by explicitly telling the crowd what he must not say while tacitly leading his listeners towards the desired reaction: "It will inflame you, it will make you mad. 'Tis good you know not that you are his heirs; for if you should, O, what would come of it!"

Instead of reading the will, Antony continued to work to excite the crowd's emotions. He made the most powerful impact yet by descending from his platform to show the people Caesar's corpse, uniting himself with the crowd in a shared moment of grief and horror. It was not merely the gruesome sight which enraged the crowd, however. Antony's use of language at this moment remained as crucial as ever. He did not simply announce what the crowd already saw, that Caesar lay dead before them. Instead, Antony divided the scene into parts and called attention each individual wound. Not only did this make his description extremely graphic, but it also allowed Antony to divide the blame for Caesar's death among the several conspirators: "Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through: See what a rent the envious Casca made: Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd; and as he pluck'd his cursed steel away, mark how the blood of Caesar follow'd it,—as rushing out of doors..."

The people erupted into vengeful fury after hearing Caesar's murder so vividly described. Antony, ever careful, distanced himself from their rage. "Let me not stir you up," he said. "I am no orator, as Brutus is; but, as you know me all, a plain blunt man ... For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth; Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, to stir men's blood." These claims are false; language now subverted reality altogether. Antony was not a plain man, but rather an army general and a cousin of the late dictator, a clear member of the Roman elite. Shakespeare illustrated this irony vividly, for although he had written Brutus' speech in plain prose, he penned all of Antony's remarks in metered verse — iambic pentameter, to be precise — and Antony, in spite of his claim to the contrary, is clearly the most artful and persuasive orator of the play.

The people continued to rage. They were so embroiled at seeing Caesar's wounds that they hastened to mutiny before even hearing the terms of the will that they had pleaded with Antony to read. Their emotions had swept them away before Antony had even provided a logical reason for their anger. His rhetoric had cast a powerful spell over their senses. When Antony did at last reveal the terms of the will, the people found that Caesar, having departed both the world and his worldly fortune, had elected to bequeath seventy-five drachmas to each man in Rome and set aside a portion of his estate for a public park. It was a small gesture from beyond the grave, but it bought the people's affection, and it now moved them to even greater fury at the assassins. The crowd broke into a violent riot, and the mob would even kill an innocent man in the next scene of the play. The people now wanted no part of the assassins' commonwealth. Antony's clever and emotional language had triumphed over Brutus' logic. The same citizen who had only minutes before praised Brutus saying, "Bring him with triumph home unto his house," now shouted "We'll burn the house of Brutus." The people had forgotten their free republic. They only wondered at Antony's behest, "Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?"

Speaking quietly to himself, Antony revealed that this mayhem had been his intent. "Now let it work. — Mischief, thou art afoot, take thou what course thou wilt!" In consequence of Antony's rhetoric, the citizens failed to heed Brutus' warnings of ambition and tyranny. They only wanted a new Caesar. Just before the scene closed, Antony's attendant brought news that Octavius had arrived in Rome. It was Octavius, Julius Caesar's great nephew, who would found Rome's new imperial dynasty under the name Caesar Augustus in 27 BCE.

In the speeches of Act III, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare illustrated the great power of language to move and incite the masses, even against their own interest. The crowd was persuaded by Brutus' logic and penetrating questions, and then by Antony and his strong appeal to emotion. Each speaker used words to frame the facts in his favor, and through language they could direct the thoughts and actions of the people. Indeed, when Antony sought to evoke an image of Caesar's power in his speech, he did not reference his sword or his armies or his wealth, but rather his speech: "But yesterday the word of Caesar might have stood against the world." Power, implied Shakespeare, rests in language — language is what moves people to act.

Shakespeare was not the first writer to suggest the power of language, and he would not be the last. Centuries later, in 1895, the British playwright Oscar Wilde remarked on the power of language to shape public opinion in his age, saying, "In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. ... We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. ... The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people's private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary."² In 1949, the English novelist George Orwell put language at the center of his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a totalitarian government refashioned language in an attempt to control what its subjects could say and think.

Many authors have asserted that language is power — but it is perhaps too easy for a writer to be convinced of the power in words. What of the world outside literature? Does rhetoric really hold such command over the masses? Shakespeare based Julius Caesar on Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, as translated into English by Sir Thomas North.³ Plutarch described the speeches by Brutus and Antony in his Life of Marcus Brutus, and while Shakespeare gave these speeches his own words, his play followed the basic outline that Plutarch provided. Plutarch's history, however, is itself something of a dramatization. It was written more than a century after Caesar's assassination, and it lists historical figures alongside mythical characters like Romulus and Theseus. It is impossible to know with any certainty what really took place in the hours and days that followed Caesar's assassination.

There are examples of persuasive rhetoric in our own time. Stephen Colbert, the popular comedian, has built his career on a parody of the language used by the media to stir political opinion. His parody succeeds best when its own satirical propaganda results in mass action. When Colbert instructs his viewers to change a Wikipedia article, they will do so. If he tells them to vote to name a bridge or a space node after him, they do it in vast numbers. Colbert has crafted a masterful cult of personality with devout worshipers, and while he makes points about the media's corrupt influence in his monologues, he proves these points by cajoling his own fans into inane but harmless foppery. The true brilliance of his comedy is the ironic way in which the same people who ridicule the illogical spin put out by politicians and talk show hosts will rapaciously gobble up the spin spun by Colbert — much like the Roman citizens before Antony — as if Colbert and his producers at Viacom were somehow unattached to the media establishment they mock.

Colbert, however, is only an entertainer — his words are only as persuasive as they are whimsical. What of real politics and actual news? Can clever language really command the masses on an issue of importance? Would real people ever be persuaded to revolt against their own self-interest, as happened in Shakespeare's play? These questions will be the subject of a future article at Acceity. In the meantime, I invite your comments below.

Notes:

1. The full text of Julius Caesar is available online from Project Gutenberg, Wikisource, MIT, and other sources
2. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1895.
3. Google Books has scanned this translation of Plutarch's Lives, and the Life of Marcus Brutus is available for your examination.