Mark Antony's Funeral Oration ("Friends, Romans, countrymen")

Summary

Mark Antony's funeral oration, which opens Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, is the turning point of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599). Caesar has been stabbed to death in the Capitol by Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators. Brutus, trusting in the justice of his cause, has allowed Antony, Caesar's friend, to speak at the funeral on condition that he blame no one, and has just persuaded the crowd in plain prose that he killed Caesar for love of Rome. Antony speaks in blank verse and appears to keep the terms. He says he comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him, and repeats that Brutus is an honourable man. But he answers the charge of ambition with facts the crowd remembers: Caesar filled the treasury with ransoms, wept when the poor cried, and three times refused the crown on the Lupercal. Each refrain about honourable men sounds more hollow. He pauses, overcome, saying his heart is in the coffin with Caesar, and lets the citizens begin to murmur on their own. Then he produces Caesar's will and refuses to read it, which makes them demand it. He comes down from the pulpit, gathers them round the body, and holds up the torn mantle, naming each wound as though he had seen it made: Cassius's dagger, the envious Casca, and the well-beloved Brutus, the most unkindest cut of all. When he uncovers the body, the crowd cries for revenge. He restrains them twice, protesting that he is no orator as Brutus is, only a plain blunt man, and then reads the will: seventy-five drachmas to every citizen, and Caesar's gardens beyond the Tiber as public parks. The crowd runs off to burn the conspirators' houses, and Antony, alone, says Mischief, thou art afoot. Shakespeare drew the scene from Plutarch's Lives in Thomas North's translation, but the speech's ironic refrains and pacing are his own. It is one of the most studied examples of persuasion in English, a demonstration of how emotion, timing and denial of intent can overturn an argument.

Top Lessons

• Saying the opposite of what you mean

  Antony never directly calls Brutus a liar; he repeats that Brutus is an honourable man until the phrase means its opposite. The speech shows how irony and repetition can carry an argument the speaker has promised not to make.

• Evidence the audience supplies

  Antony asks questions instead of drawing conclusions (Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?) and lets the citizens answer for themselves. He appeals to what they saw on the Lupercal and to what they feel at the sight of the wounds, so that their own judgment seems to convict the conspirators.

• The power and danger of persuasion

  The oration ends with a crowd rushing to burn houses, and in the next scene that crowd kills Cinna the poet for having the same name as a conspirator. Shakespeare shows rhetoric as a force that can serve loyalty and grief and also unleash disorder its speaker welcomes but cannot direct.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The scene is built around a corpse and its wounds: Antony uncovers Caesar's body, catalogues the stab wounds through the mantle, and turns the crowd's grief into rage. For the history of medicine, the ancient sources add a notable detail Shakespeare omits: Suetonius (Julius 82) reports that Caesar received twenty-three wounds and that the physician Antistius judged only one, the second, in the breast, to have been mortal, an early recorded opinion on the cause of a death. Antony's warning that the will would inflame the crowd and make them mad, and the riot that follows, give a dramatic picture of collective emotion; any reading of it in terms of crowd psychology is interpretive.

• Act 3, Scene 2 (at Caesar's body)

  Antony points to the rents in Caesar's mantle made by Cassius, Casca and Brutus, then uncovers the wounded body before the crowd.

• Act 3, Scene 2 (close of the first speech)

  Antony breaks off, saying his heart is in the coffin with Caesar, a display of grief that moves the citizens.