After helping to murder Julius Caesar, Brutus explains himself to the people:
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.1
It’s difficult to imagine a more Roman sentiment. Brutus has killed someone he loved because the needs of his country mattered more. His own life is equally expendable if necessary, he tells the crowd.
But what is this ‘Rome’? Who gets to define it?
To Shakespeare’s audience, Rome was more than an idea – it was often an ideal.
Renaissance Europe looked backwards to the classical world for models of art, architecture, government, rhetoric, and civic virtue. England could even trace its legendary beginnings to a different Brutus – of Troy, supposedly descended from Aeneas and therefore connected to the same Trojan past claimed by Rome.
When James I finally made his ceremonial entry into London in 1604 (after the previous year’s plague had delayed the celebrations) he passed through triumphal arches consciously drawing upon the imagery of ancient Rome.
Rome wasn’t just somewhere in the past. It was an aspirational image of what your own country might be. Great for entertainment; politically useful, too.
At least a carefully curated idea of it was.
sixteenth – century England had begun to see itself as a new emerging model of all that had once been great about ancient Rome : its discipline , its power , its cultural sophistication and its global reach. The nation – or at least many within it – saw itself reclaiming that imperial mantle from a Rome which was now associated with a discredited and corruptly ‘Papist’ religion.2
And certainly there was a certain irony in Protestant England looking admiringly towards ancient Rome after spending much of the previous century distancing itself from another Rome, ruled by a Pope, not an emperor.
Introducing Titus Andronicus, Professor Jonathan Bate suggests:
Shakespeare is interrogating Rome, asking what kind of an example it provides for Elizabethan England.3
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar makes the idea of Rome remarkably difficult to pin down, doesn’t it?
The play doesn’t begin with Brutus’s noble republican ideals. It begins with a mob having a day off. They’re celebrating Caesar’s victory. The tribunes remind them that not long ago the same people crowded onto walls, towers and even chimney tops to cheer Pompey.
Now Pompey is dead and they’re cheering the man who defeated his sons.
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey?
It’s an odd foundation for Brutus’s later certainty about ‘the good of Rome’.
Because who is ‘Rome’? What does ‘Rome’ want? Or need?
Within 75 lines, Shakespeare suggests it is divided, and that its ordinary citizens are politically volatile. They act, and create the Rome they want. A ‘bread and circuses’ Rome, maybe? As we see later, spectacularly so. The revolution will not be televised.
Brutus’s funeral speech gives us another Rome. His is an ideal built upon liberty, honour and resistance to tyranny:
Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.
Caesar or Rome. Friendship or duty. The individual or the common good. And Brutus doesn’t merely hold that belief.
He acts upon it.
Caesar is his friend. Doing nothing would surely be easier. But once Brutus has convinced himself (partly thanks to Cassius) that Caesar threatens Rome, he accepts what he believes that conviction requires of him.
That’s admirable. It’s also terrifying.
Because courage doesn’t make you right.
How does his audience respond?
Having listened to Brutus explain why no Roman should accept servitude under a Caesar, one citizen enthusiastically responds:
Let him be Caesar.
Not quite the lesson Brutus was hoping they’d take away.
When Antony speaks, something curious happens.
He hardly talks about Rome at all.
Brutus reduces Caesar to an abstract concept: ambition which threatens Rome.
Antony makes him human again.
He was Antony’s friend. He wept for the poor. He refused the crown. He remembered the citizens in his will. Antony shows the crowd his mantle, then his wounds, then his body.
Brutus talks about Rome.
Antony talks about Caesar.
And the crowd changes its mind again.
Within minutes, the Romans who applauded Brutus are shouting:
Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!
I don’t think it’s simply that the mob is fickle. Their changing ideas about Rome have consequences. Once Antony persuades them that Caesar, rather than Brutus, represented their interests, they act: immediately and violently.
Perhaps Rome isn’t quite the fixed thing Brutus thinks it is.
Perhaps it’s partly an idea, continually recreated according to people’s needs and the flow of events.
Cassius has his Rome too.
He complains that Caesar:
doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus
while men such as Cassius have been reduced to ‘petty men‘. It’s not long that I discussed his motives.
He repeatedly invokes Roman liberty and former greatness. But Shakespeare also allows resentment and wounded pride to show through his patriotism.
Samuel Johnson would later famously remark that:
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.4
Johnson wasn’t attacking genuine love of country. He was suspicious of people who used patriotism to disguise less noble motives.
He might recognise this type in Cassius.
Brutus? That’s a more tricky problem. At the end of the play, Antony explicitly distinguishes him from the other conspirators:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of them.
Brutus really did believe he was acting “for the good of Rome.”
That’s more troubling, I think. It’s relatively easy to distrust someone who claims to act for their country while secretly pursuing their own interests. What do we do with someone who sincerely believes that they know what their country’s interests are, and is prepared to act accordingly?
Shakespeare returned to Rome in Antony and Cleopatra, and there Cleopatra provides one of my favourite descriptions of Antony:
He was disposed to mirth, but on the sudden
A Roman thought hath struck him.5
She isn’t suggesting he’s feeling homesick.
Roman has become an adjective for a way of thinking.
Duty. Honour. Country. Self-command. The subordination of private desires to something supposedly greater.
Brutus sacrifices his ‘best lover‘ to it.
Antony spends much of another play discovering just how difficult that Roman way of thinking is to escape.
Perhaps Shakespeare’s final tribute to Brutus is significant. He begins as ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ and ends, only a few lines later, simply as ‘a man’.
Rome meant an enormous amount to Shakespeare’s culture. It means an enormous amount to Brutus. I’m just not sure Julius Caesar ever lets us become quite as certain as Brutus is about what Rome means.
And before anyone acts ‘for the good of a country‘, that seems like a fairly important question to answer.
Sources and Further Reading
Title: Gil Scott-Heron, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, Pieces of a Man (1971)
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Thomson Learning, 1998) ↩︎
- Andrew James Hartley, ed., Julius Caesar: A Critical Reader, Arden Early Modern Drama Guides (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). ↩︎
- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Routledge, 1995). ↩︎
- James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887), entry for 7 April 1775. ↩︎
- William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995). ↩︎
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