Episode #241 ... The Tragedy of Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare

Speaker 1 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This.

Speaker 1 Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical Writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there.
Hope you love the show today.

Speaker 1 So the following here is a guide for someone that's wanting to know more about the philosophy written into The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, a play written by William Shakespeare.

Speaker 1 Because there's a lot he wanted to say in this play about political violence, about the irony of living your life based on a moral ideal, about the importance of actually asking the correct questions when it comes to rhetoric and its impact on mass psychology.

Speaker 1 And out of respect to your time, I just want to get right into the story today and talk about how Shakespeare makes a drama or a tragic play out of the actual assassination of Julius Caesar that occurred in the real world.

Speaker 1 Should be said, there's certainly plenty about this play that's not historically accurate. But look, it...

Speaker 1 it is truly impressive how much Shakespeare works in real people and events that were close to Julius Caesar when he was killed.

Speaker 1 All of this Shakespeare takes mostly from the historian Plutarch, for whatever it's worth, and his description of what happened in Rome all those years ago.

Speaker 1 Anyway, all these characters are going to be critical for understanding what he was going for, and we'll understand it by the end of this episode.

Speaker 1 The play begins, the curtain opens, and the first thing we see is a giant party that's going on in the streets of Rome.

Speaker 1 A mass of people have taken to the streets and are cheering and celebrating the return of Julius Caesar and his army. See, Rome's a society at this point.
It's in a pretty messy situation internally.

Speaker 1 In the decades leading up to this moment, Rome has had a few civil wars. Tyrants have ascended to power.
They've been overthrown by other tyrants.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of infighting about what the direction is that the country should be going in. But in the current moment, though, Rome is a republic, at least for now.

Speaker 1 And the whole point of a republic to Rome is that no one person is going to run everything.

Speaker 1 Power is something that gets spread out across multiple different offices and councils, and the people of a republic are supposed to show up and argue on behalf of what they think is best for the city.

Speaker 1 In other words, despite whatever real fundamental differences may exist between the citizens, there importantly, always in a republic, an agreement among them that they want to find a way to work together on it.

Speaker 1 But when Caesar's returning with his army here, and the people are in the streets celebrating it, the play begins with two elected officials that are watching this party going on, and they're commenting on how dangerous this all seems to be for the health of the republic.

Speaker 1 Look at how fickle and easily influenced the crowd is, they say. Look at the way they're celebrating this guy, chanting his name.

Speaker 1 I mean, honestly, this doesn't really look like the behavior of people in a republic at all, they say.

Speaker 1 What this is starting to look like is crowd behavior you typically see in a monarchy or a tyranny.

Speaker 1 Keep in mind, by the way, that this battle that Caesar just returned from, this wasn't him fighting against some outside enemy that wanted to do the people of Rome harm.

Speaker 1 No, Caesar just beat someone who was a fellow Roman citizen. It was a guy named Pompey and all of his sons.

Speaker 1 These are people who were fellow Romans to Caesar, rival generals that just had their own armies fighting for them.

Speaker 1 Point is, these two officials are looking out at this crowd and they're asking, what kind of crowd celebrates the defeat of their fellow Romans and neighbors so much?

Speaker 1 Again, this doesn't look like people that are part of a republic anymore. And it's clear that the people are hitching their wagons to the person that's about to be in charge next.

Speaker 1 That if you want to be on the right side of things, you got to be on Team Caesar right now and go hail to this man in the streets a little bit. That's just what you got to do.

Speaker 1 The two officials talking about how scary this all is start tearing down pictures of Caesar that are up all over the walls of the city.

Speaker 1 All this, they think, is dangerously stoking people's emotions in ways that are going to spiral into Caesar maybe being crowned as the king of Rome.

Speaker 1 In fact, as Caesar parades into the city and then into the public square with his entourage, and then he gets on stage with people gathered there to honor him, he's offered the crown, you know, they try to place it on his head for him to become the king of Rome, but he refuses it.

Speaker 1 The crowd goes wild. Two more times the crown is offered to him in this ceremony.
He refuses it both times. People are like, see, see? He doesn't even want to be a king.

Speaker 1 All the more reason to love him and try to make him the king. As Caesar's on stage, the crowd gets quiet for a moment, and a mysterious person calls out to Caesar from the back of the crowd.

Speaker 1 He's like, Caesar, beware the Ides of March. The Ides of March being just another way of saying the 15th of March, right in the middle of the month.
It's coming up in a few days for them.

Speaker 1 And Caesar hears this guy tell him to beware of something. And with the crowd around, he just kind of laughs it off.
You know, I'll have what that guy's having.

Speaker 1 And the whole crowd laughs. It's a jolly day for everyone.
But we smash cut to two members of Caesar's entourage that are having a conversation after this ceremony.

Speaker 1 And these two people are going to become the main characters in the story that Shakespeare's about to tell. Their names are Cassius and Brutus.

Speaker 1 And to put it simply, they're having very different reactions to all this Caesar business going down where the crowd's starting to get behind him.

Speaker 1 Cassius looks at Brutus, who's pacing around, clearly deep in thought about it. And he says, I can tell you're a bit stressed about all this, Brutus.

Speaker 1 To which Brutus says, yeah, I'm absolutely stressed about it. Look at what's going on.
We're both senators that have a duty to protect the Republic of Rome.

Speaker 1 And here's this guy, Caesar, who I've never had any problem with. He's certainly never done anything to me, and he hasn't made a move for the crown yet.

Speaker 1 But still, with this whole aura you can see clearly from the crowd, it does make me feel like we're about to lose the Republic. What do we do?

Speaker 1 See, Brutus' character represents Stoicism as a philosophical approach in the play, and this is very deliberate by William Shakespeare.

Speaker 1 He's married to the daughter of Cato the Younger in the play, famous Stoic.

Speaker 1 He represents a type of Stoicism talked about by Cicero, where there's more of an emphasis placed on service to your country rather than just personal moral development.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Brutus is in one of these classic Stoic moments where he's feeling conflicted between the rational moral duty he has to Rome and its ideals and his personal loyalty to Caesar as just a fellow person and maybe even someone he considers to be a friend.

Speaker 1 Cassius, on the other hand, has a very different monologue going on inside of him. See, he's long been a political rival of Julius Caesar.

Speaker 1 He's said some stuff in public about this guy that's pretty mean.

Speaker 1 And look, the last thing he wants in the entire world is for Julius Caesar to have a monarch level of control over the political process.

Speaker 1 So for very personal personal reasons, Cassius has a plan where he wants to kill Caesar before he can ever get into power.

Speaker 1 But he knows if he just does it, even if he does it with the help of a couple other lowly senators, he knows the optics of it all is going to make him look like an assassin that was just bloodthirsty, or make him look like he just wants to be king himself.

Speaker 1 He can't just come out and do it.

Speaker 1 His plan then becomes to recruit Brutus into the plot to kill him because he knows Brutus is seen by the people as a very moral, stoic senator that loves Rome, and the people think that he'd never do anything if it wasn't what's best for Rome.

Speaker 1 He knows Brutus' involvement is going to make things look a lot better for him, so he starts to flatter Brutus a bit in this conversation. He tells Brutus he's incredible.

Speaker 1 He reminds Brutus that it was his ancestor that overthrew the first king of Rome for going against the principles of Rome.

Speaker 1 He starts to question Brutus' honor, and this is something that really starts to get to him.

Speaker 1 Like, what, you're conflicted about your loyalty to Caesar as an individual, but what about your honor to Rome and the common good? Are you not a man of honor? He says.

Speaker 1 And Brutus says, look, I get your point. And I am honorable, by the way.

Speaker 1 Papa Brutus is still here, guys, alright? It's just I'm not certain that killing Caesar is what's going to be best for Rome.

Speaker 1 And if I had that kind of assurance, then there's no question I'd live up to my honor here and do what's necessary.

Speaker 1 So Cassius, hearing this from Brutus, has somebody write up a bunch of fake letters addressed to Brutus that are supposedly Roman citizens that he represents that are calling upon him to save Rome by doing away with Caesar.

Speaker 1 And it's this fake picture that Cassius manufactures of what's going on in the world. This becomes the thing that convinces Brutus that he needs to join this plot in the name of saving the Republic.

Speaker 1 The play goes on, and there are several other senators that become a part of this conspiracy. One of them even flatters and persuades Caesar to come to the government building on the Ides of March.

Speaker 1 And on that day, as the conspirators all escort Caesar to the government building where they sit around and discuss policy, One of the conspirators is asking Caesar to pardon his brother, who had been banished from the city before that, and Caesar says no.

Speaker 1 As he's distracted, Casca, one of the killers, pulls out a knife and he says, speak hands for me, as he stabs Julius Caesar, signaling all the other conspirators to move.

Speaker 1 Then each of them, in turn, stab him repeatedly, one by one, the last of which to do the stabbing here is Brutus, who Caesar looks up at as he's stabbing him, and here he says the famous line from the play, et tu, Brute, or essentially, you too, Brutus.

Speaker 1 Then falls Caesar. as he collapses onto the ground, completely lifeless, the conspirators standing around him.

Speaker 1 The plot to kill Julius Caesar seems to them to have been successful up until this moment.

Speaker 1 Now, first things first, there are several different messages that Shakespeare wanted to get across in this story so far, many of which are him wanting to highlight the ambiguity of how these sorts of events play out.

Speaker 1 Remember, this is a tragedy in the ancient Greek sense. So, this is not going to be like a modern movie where there's a clear good guy and a bad guy.

Speaker 1 You know, part of what the audience is called to do here in a tragedy is to consider the situation when we don't idealize or demonize things.

Speaker 1 But that said, one of the more critical messages he intended that's really important to start out with here is that he wanted to show how political violence like this is almost always pretty naive about how political reality works, and that this almost never accomplishes what the person committing the violence intended for it to do.

Speaker 1 To put it in a slightly different way, the whole premise of political violence is pretty off when it goes on in a republic.

Speaker 1 First of all, go through history for a second and count up the number of times in a republic that somebody thinks someone is a problem for them politically, so they assassinate them, and then the whole world just kind of moves on from them.

Speaker 1 Oh, well, guess that person's dead. What are we going to do next, guys? No, the reality of the world never happens like that.

Speaker 1 Political violence will almost always further anger and embolden the people that were behind that person in the first place.

Speaker 1 They also often turn that person into a symbol for a cause that's much greater than simply that one person.

Speaker 1 So violence in practice often becomes something that strengthens the cause of the person they're against.

Speaker 1 And Shakespeare's saying here that just strictly when it comes to tactics, political violence is pretty stupid when it goes on in a republic like this.

Speaker 1 Political violence is also pretty filled with hypocrisy, at least in the way it's being done by the conspirators in the play we're discussing.

Speaker 1 The argument here reminds me of the way Albert Camus opposes the death penalty and his famous essay, Reflections on the Guillotine.

Speaker 1 Remember, where part of his point is that if somebody does something horrific and violent to innocent people, violates their lives in a way that's just unforgivable.

Speaker 1 And if your knee-jerk reaction to that is that, in the name of the sanctity of life, we need to kill this person and take their life.

Speaker 1 And anyone who disagrees with that is just secretly on the side of the murderers.

Speaker 1 Camus would say not only is this one of the most clear examples of hypocrisy you can find, but that most people who talk this way have no idea how much the thing they're supporting there is eroding the very ideals they claim to care so much about.

Speaker 1 To live in a society that openly violates the sanctity of life so easily is part of what ends up making it so not sacred to people.

Speaker 1 Well, in a similar way, for Brutus and Cassius, to say that in the name of preserving the Republic and all that it stands for, I need to kill this person I think is dangerous.

Speaker 1 This is the definition of stepping outside of a peaceful way of working through political differences to supposedly preserve the sanctity of the peaceful political setup.

Speaker 1 This is hypocrisy, in other words, clear as day.

Speaker 1 Another thing Shakespeare wants to do here is point out how, even if Brutus and Cassius say they're killing this guy to preserve the sanctity of the Republic, What republic exactly are they preserving here?

Speaker 1 They're looking back at their history.

Speaker 1 They have this nostalgic memory of some idealized republic where everybody apparently worked together and the rivers ran with chocolate syrup as far as the eye can see.

Speaker 1 But it's like, did that republic ever really exist in the first place?

Speaker 1 The point is, oftentimes when people commit political violence like this, they're doing so to stop the world from changing into something that in many ways it already is and has already been.

Speaker 1 I mean, Rome by this point had been going through decades of civil wars and inner conflict.

Speaker 1 It's always easy to look at the problems of right now, think back to some distant moment in the past when you didn't seem to have any problems, and then try to make the world fit into this nostalgic fantasy of yours.

Speaker 1 You can do this with your childhood, you can do this with romantic relationships, and it's in this sense that Brutus and Cassius killed a person in the name of saving a Rome that never really existed.

Speaker 1 Now again, part of what Shakespeare is trying to do in this play is to get the audience to consider the complexities that led to this whole political assassination in the first place.

Speaker 1 And another angle to all this that he does a great job at illustrating is how if someone thinks of themselves as having a lot of honor, this is a virtue that, in practice, makes someone pretty easy to manipulate if a bad actor ever wanted to.

Speaker 1 Brutus is, of course, the character he uses the show at this point, and Cassius is the one who manipulates him.

Speaker 1 It's funny, if you asked 100 people what the top five most important virtues are, it wouldn't be shocking if a lot of them included honor on that list.

Speaker 1 But this is what I love about Shakespeare and this play. What exactly does it mean to have honor? I mean, really, try to come up with a definition on your own right now.

Speaker 1 There haven't been a ton of philosophers over the years who have done a really deep dive into honor and all that it can mean. And it turns out, it's a surprisingly open-ended virtue, honor.

Speaker 1 First of all, because honor always means you're adhering to some kind of a code.

Speaker 1 And because that code isn't necessarily fixed to anything, really, different people can think of themselves as honorable, and it manifests in extremely different behaviors we call honorable in the real world.

Speaker 1 You know, one person may say, you never rat on your friends. All right, that's a matter of of honor.
You keep your mouth shut. That's the code we live by.

Speaker 1 But another person might say, if your friend's about to drive drunk, for example, you tell the bartender they're drunk and to have them take their keys.

Speaker 1 Because true honor is looking out for your friends when they're about to hurt themselves.

Speaker 1 See, when you consider the fact that that code that someone's honoring is always something they've received from other people.

Speaker 1 And when you consider that it's your public reputation that is where your honor usually lies, well, this externalizes the moral process in a way that takes people out of internal deliberation about what the right thing to do is and turns their decision-making into something very simple.

Speaker 1 I mean, if moral choices otherwise are difficult, if someone like Brutus finds himself morally conflicted and at war within himself, he says, when he actually makes the effort to try to consider all the factors involved in killing Caesar, well, all it takes is Cassius coming along, questioning whether he's honoring the code he's sworn to protect.

Speaker 1 That's all it takes for Brutus to abandon any kind of deliberation he's been doing and snap back into being a loyalist.

Speaker 1 And when loyalists, an honor to a pre-established code, replaces people who actually show up and try to weigh the moral complexity of big decisions.

Speaker 1 Well, Shakespeare's point is that this can turn catastrophic in a republic, especially when it allows people to sidestep the deeper conversations with themselves of why they're doing anything in the first place.

Speaker 1 Consider the fact that someone can be doing something, and they can say this is for the good of the species why they're doing it, you know, not unlike Brutus, who says he's saving the Republic.

Speaker 1 But if somebody can always hide behind this honor, say things like, I'm doing this all for the greater greater good, that is someone who can also ignore a lot of twisted reasons why they might be driven to do any of these things, and they can avoid considering the negative effects of what they're doing, and later just call all the bodies in the streets, oh, those were just unintended consequences.

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Speaker 1 And now, back to the podcast. You know, Frederick Nietzsche talked about this point, among other people.

Speaker 1 And by the way, Nietzsche thought this play was the greatest thing Shakespeare ever wrote, for whatever it's worth.

Speaker 1 But he talks right along these same lines when he says, a real danger when people just conform their behavior to an ideal or live by honor to a code is that when they abandon the work of truly considering all their inner drives and all the external factors that go into a decision that affects other people, they become somebody who's far more easily manipulated by anyone that's persuasive enough to convince them that what they want them to do is exactly what their code demands of them.

Speaker 1 It becomes far easier for someone like Brutus to become a fanatic instrument for Cassius when he's not considering how the rhetoric being used by Cassius is switching the interpretation of the code he's already committed himself to.

Speaker 1 This is one of the most important points Shakespeare is aiming at in this play. And let's bring in a few more events from the story to build on this idea more.

Speaker 1 Because after Caesar gets murdered in that governing hall, all the conspirators, knives in hand, as soon as that happens, pandemonium starts to break out all around them.

Speaker 1 People start screaming, running away. Some of the conspirators start screaming themselves.
Tyranny is dead. The Republic is saved.
Hooray for us and all that we've done here.

Speaker 1 Brutus even thinks it's a good idea at this point for all of them to bathe in the blood of Caesar up to their elbows.

Speaker 1 I'm serious about that.

Speaker 1 The thinking by him is, look, hundreds of years from now, when the history books are written, us bathing in the blood of a tyrant like this is definitely going to be one of those strong visuals that people are going to love.

Speaker 1 You know, yet another kind of nostalgia for a world that never existed.

Speaker 1 After their communal bath ceremony, part of the plot of the conspirators so that they could get to a place where they could actually stab Caesar was they made sure beforehand to separate him from his close friend and the person most likely to intervene if they were to do this, a guy named Mark Antony.

Speaker 1 Mark Antony hears about what happened to Caesar, and he sends a messenger to tell the conspirators that he's calm, he has no desire to hurt any of them, that he just wants to go back and collect Caesar's body, and perhaps ask them some questions about why exactly Julius Caesar needed to be murdered as opposed to any of the other options it could have chosen.

Speaker 1 When he gets there, Brutus explains his whole side of the story, that he wanted to save the Republic. And after hearing his story, Mark Antony gets an idea.

Speaker 1 He shakes Brutus' hand, as well as the bloody hands of all the conspirators, and he says, okay, guys, I'm done here. But I do have one request, though, if I may.

Speaker 1 I'd really like to take Caesar's body out to the public forum, you know, stand up in front of everybody and give a speech, sort of eulogize the guy.

Speaker 1 And look, I'm just trying to give the people of Rome some clarity about all that's gone down here today. To which Brutus says, that's a great idea.
I like that plan.

Speaker 1 But listen, Mark Antony, the whole point of all this is to preserve the Republic and keep things stable.

Speaker 1 And if you do this, you can't go out there and just start trashing me and all the other conspirators in front of the crowd.

Speaker 1 And, you know, just to be extra safe here, I, Brutus, am going to go out there before you, and I'm going to give a speech and address the crowd myself.

Speaker 1 What follows from here is nothing short of a masterpiece of rhetoric, as Shakespeare writes both the arguments given to the crowd by Brutus and Mark Antony. Brutus goes up first.

Speaker 1 He starts his speech with, Romans, countrymen, and lovers, hear me for my cause. He then proceeds to give a rational, articulate, intelligent speech about the ethics of why Caesar just had to go.

Speaker 1 It's not that I did not love Caesar, he says, but that I loved Rome more.

Speaker 1 Brutus talks about the insane ambition of Julius Caesar and how it was incompatible with the experiment that Rome was trying to run.

Speaker 1 And by the end of him talking, that very same fickle crowd that was hailing Caesar in the streets at the beginning of the play, the crowd that earlier in that same day would have made Caesar king if only he had agreed to it, they have now been convinced by the force of reason that Brutus and the conspirators is the side that Rome needs to be on.

Speaker 1 Thunderous applause. Nice job, Brutus.
What a guy. Maybe we should let him be Caesar, one of them says.
And then Mark Antony gives his speech.

Speaker 1 He starts with one of the most famous lines in all of classic literature. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

Speaker 1 See, already in that first line there, he's posturing himself in a very unassuming way to set the tone that'll allow for him to deliver a death blow to all the conspirators.

Speaker 1 Because Mark Antony, when he gives this speech, he doesn't prioritize rational arguments to the crowd. Mark Antony appeals to their emotions.

Speaker 1 He gives them a speech that makes them feel fear and envy and disgust for some of their fellow people.

Speaker 1 He keeps referring to all the conspirators as honorable people, where the more he says the word honorable, and then he goes back and talks about what they've done to Caesar a bit more, and then keeps coming back to that word honorable, the crowd starts to realize that this is sarcasm.

Speaker 1 And the same crowd that was earlier in the day a fan of Caesar, that 10 minutes ago was a fan of Brutus, through the rhetorical skill of Mark Antony, he drives the crowd into a frenzy, to the point that Brutus, Cassius, and all the other conspirators have to flee Rome just to continue fighting for their own lives.

Speaker 1 Now, the importance of rhetoric, especially in a republic, is one of the biggest points that Shakespeare wanted to put on display here.

Speaker 1 You know, it's interesting to consider that in a monarchy, if you're just an ordinary person living your life and you happen to be really great at rhetoric and persuasion, That is likely not going to translate into much political power for you at all in that society.

Speaker 1 It's far more likely it's going to be something that gets you into trouble at some point.

Speaker 1 And it's most likely the only time you're ever going to use that skill is when you're being super duper persuasive to the parking enforcement person that's trying to give you a ticket.

Speaker 1 That's about all it does for you.

Speaker 1 But one of Shakespeare's points here is that when a society turns into a republic, where again, now it's about people educating themselves and arguing for what they think is best for a society, all of a sudden in that world, somebody who's really talented at rhetoric becomes potentially one of the most politically powerful people in the entire country.

Speaker 1 They know how to phrase things in a way that really resonates with people. They know how to play on people's emotions.

Speaker 1 They They know how to speak to different crowds and be selective, you know, exclude certain pieces of what's going on to make this picture of reality seem like the obvious truth.

Speaker 1 And great rhetoricians like this, as we know, often get hired by people that already have political power because people in power generally know how important it is to have someone like this framing things in the most favorable way for them.

Speaker 1 Point is, in a republic, This is actually where the battle for political power is won and lost. It's at the level of rhetoric.

Speaker 1 When Mark Antony says, friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, that lend me your ears part is highly symbolic for Shakespeare of how and where people seize political power in a republican system.

Speaker 1 And more than that, whoever wins or loses here doesn't even necessarily need to represent a full picture of what's going on in the world.

Speaker 1 Facts start to matter less in a republic than how much the narrative impacts the crowd. Remember Cassius forges the fake letters of concerned citizens calling upon Brutus to save the Republic.

Speaker 1 Does that remind you of anything that's going on today?

Speaker 1 And remember, it was those fake letters that were the thing that shook Brutus out of that place of moral deliberation and then made him go all in on killing Julius Caesar.

Speaker 1 All that it takes in a republic for an otherwise serious person to give up their moral responsibility is a fragment of information about something going on in the world and then rhetoric persuasive enough to convince them that this is the whole truth.

Speaker 1 Now, don't take this as Shakespeare saying we shouldn't have republics.

Speaker 1 This is more him calling upon people to understand the responsibility we have, to ask the right questions of the people that give us our information about the world.

Speaker 1 Consider the fact that neither Mark Antony or Brutus are just straight shooters in these speeches where they're innocently trying to deliver the unbiased truth to people.

Speaker 1 And in a republic, especially in the post-truth age we live in when it comes to media, we need to understand how this applies to everyone we get our information from.

Speaker 1 Political power is always hanging in the balance, and we can't be so naive to think that the biggest issue we face as listeners is just figuring out what the truth is from all the different sources out there.

Speaker 1 No, the deeper concern here is for us to become students of the rhetoric that manufactures what we collectively consider to be the truth in any given moment.

Speaker 1 In fact, this whole play, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, is often thought of by scholars to be Shakespeare giving an extensive tour of four different kinds of rhetoric that he sees captivating people.

Speaker 1 And depending on the kind of rhetoric that resonates with you personally, that will often determine the kind of people you listen to.

Speaker 1 Brutus thinks of rhetoric as the skill of creating rational narratives about the world. Mark Antony uses rhetoric as a weapon or an instrument of power.

Speaker 1 Cassius uses rhetoric in a private, almost Machiavellian sense, where the ends always justify the means to him. And Caesar uses rhetoric in a way to command people's actions in the most effective way.

Speaker 1 See, Brutus made a big mistake when he went out into the forum and gave a totally rational speech to the people in that crowd.

Speaker 1 That crowd was not filled with people that loved reason and the Republic as much as Brutus did. No, the people were angry.

Speaker 1 And when their emotions were already elevated in the crazy spot that Rome was in at the time, appealing to those emotions just became a much more potent form of rhetoric regardless of whatever the truth was.

Speaker 1 So in a world, again, where this is where political power is won and lost, it's the quality of the listener that determines a lot of what actually goes on, of who can ascend to power through a narrative, and who can maintain that power by controlling the narrative.

Speaker 1 Shakespeare seems to want us to understand that it's only us as listeners that have the power to verify the quality of any of these stories we're given.

Speaker 1 And if the world's made up mostly of people that aren't aware that this is ultimately the game that's being played, if most people really think that what they're doing is just figuring out the truth instead of studying how that truth is constructed through rhetoric, then to Shakespeare, they are as susceptible to rhetoric as Brutus was, where he gets manipulated by Cassius privately and then destroyed by Mark Antony publicly.

Speaker 1 Now, after this scene, where Mark Antony gives the speech and the conspirators have to flee Rome, the rest of the play is pretty brutal for Cassius and Brutus.

Speaker 1 A civil war breaks out in Rome right after the assassination, far from the outcome they planned on when they decided it was the right thing to do in their infinite wisdom.

Speaker 1 When they're in exile, the two of them get into a heated argument. They almost have a complete falling out.
Eventually they make up, though.

Speaker 1 Shortly after this, Brutus' wife kills herself by swallowing hot coals, apparently. Ow.

Speaker 1 I mean, Brutus struggles to hold himself together after this, despite trying to maintain his public stoic leader persona. But eventually, exile or not, the world catches up to both of them.

Speaker 1 The two of them have to fight on a battlefield in this civil war that their actions have started.

Speaker 1 Cassius, in the middle of one battle, asks a friend of his to kill him because he thinks he's about to lose the battle and get captured. Turns out, in a very tragic way, he just misread the situation.

Speaker 1 But he's dead anyway, after he makes that choice, so there goes Cassius.

Speaker 1 Brutus, on the other hand, wins his first battle against Mark Antony and company, but then in a follow-up battle, he ends up getting crushed and then takes his own life instead of facing the consequences of being paraded around Rome and all the stuff that would no doubt come.

Speaker 1 And at the end of the play, Mark Antony gives a speech talking kindly about Brutus, and he famously refers to Brutus as the noblest Roman of them all.

Speaker 1 He says this was a man who, unlike all the other conspirators, joined the assassination plot not out of envy of Caesar, but out of an honest thought for the common good of Rome.

Speaker 1 The play then comes to an end, heavily implying that now that all these civil war battles are over, Octavius, Caesar's nephew, is going to rule over Rome as a monarch, and that the Republic has now finally come to an end.

Speaker 1 Some important things to consider about this play now that we're at the end of it.

Speaker 1 Scholars have pretty much agreed for hundreds of years now that the main tragic hero of this play is not Julius Caesar, but Brutus.

Speaker 1 So if you're ever watching the play or reading through it, be sure to keep a special eye on him and his own personal transformation.

Speaker 1 He's an interesting kind of tragic hero because in many tragedies, you know, you usually see characters have some kind of a downfall because of their own pride or lust or hubris, whatever it is.

Speaker 1 But with Brutus, his downfall is really connected to him just overestimating how much good he's capable of doing.

Speaker 1 As for all the death and self-harm towards the end of the play, this is sometimes thought of as Shakespeare giving Brutus the Stoic death that he really deserved.

Speaker 1 As many out there may know, there's parts of Stoic ethics that say that taking your own life can be a rational choice should the circumstances make it impossible to continue living rationally, which, to be clear here for them, is a very extreme circumstance they don't take lightly.

Speaker 1 But that said, one very interesting line of thinking I've seen on this comes from a professor named Patrick Gray, where he makes a case about Brutus, that this whole tension that we've seen in him from the very start of the play, this war within himself between the loyalty to the humanity of Caesar and the duty he has to honor Rome itself.

Speaker 1 Patrick Gray makes the case that this could be Shakespeare using Brutus as a stage to play out the tensions between a disciplined stoic moral approach and a proto-Christian moral approach that more values mercy and human dignity.

Speaker 1 that the two of these, when they coexist inside someone, will often create tensions if someone tries to live by both of them simultaneously.

Speaker 1 That this is what Shakespeare was really going for, and in Gray's reading, that Brutus taking his own life at the end of the play.

Speaker 1 This isn't some sign from Shakespeare that Stoicism finally won out inside of Brutus.

Speaker 1 To him, this is the tragic end of a person who never really becomes the emotionless Stoic sage he wants to be, and also never quite finds a way to live at peace with the compassion that keeps disrupting this Stoic ideal he's trying to live by.

Speaker 1 Anyway, I hope this guide was helpful to you if you're ever reading or seeing this play. As always, can't wait for the discussion in the comments section on Patreon.
Look forward to it.

Speaker 1 Let me know if you want more guides on the major works of Shakespeare. I love giving you all what you want.
I just have to know about it. Hope you have a great rest of your week.

Speaker 1 Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.