Five-minute digest
Julius Caesar
Summary
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness. Cassius, resentful and shrewd, works on his friend Marcus Brutus, a man revered for his honesty, by flattery and forged letters, telling him that the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. Brutus, sleepless, persuades himself in his orchard that Caesar must die not for any personal cause but for the general good, lest ambition make him a tyrant. He joins the conspirators but overrules Cassius twice: Antony is to be spared, and later allowed to speak at the funeral. Brutus's wife Portia, who has wounded her own thigh to prove her constancy, begs to share his secret. On the morning of the Ides, Caesar's wife Calphurnia, terrified by dreams and portents, persuades him to stay home, but Decius flatters him into going to the Capitol. There, as he declares himself constant as the northern star, the conspirators stab him, Brutus last; Caesar's last words are 'Et tu, Brute?' Brutus explains to the people that he loved Caesar but loved Rome more, and wins them. Antony then speaks over the body, repeating that Brutus is an honourable man until the phrase turns to irony, showing the wounds and reading Caesar's will, and turns the crowd into a mob that burns the conspirators' houses and kills the poet Cinna for his name. Antony, Octavius and Lepidus form a triumvirate. In the camp at Sardis, Brutus and Cassius quarrel bitterly over money and honor and are reconciled; Brutus then reveals that Portia has killed herself, and Caesar's ghost appears to him promising to meet him at Philippi. In the battle Cassius, mistaking a report, has his servant kill him; Brutus, defeated, runs on his own sword, saying Caesar may now be still. Antony praises Brutus as the noblest Roman of them all, the only conspirator who acted for the common good.
Top Lessons
Good men can reason their way to wrong
Brutus admits he knows no personal cause against Caesar and kills him for what he might become. The play shows how an honorable man, trusting abstract reasoning, can do a grave wrong and set loose worse evils.
The power of rhetoric
Brutus speaks to the crowd's reason in plain prose; Antony moves their passions with irony, the wounds and the will. The funeral scene is a lesson in how speech can sway a people for good or ill.
Friendship tested by power
Brutus betrays Caesar's friendship for Rome, and Brutus and Cassius nearly break their own friendship in the tent at Sardis. The play makes loyalty and its limits a central moral question.
Fate, omen and choice
Storms, dreams, the soothsayer and the ghost all warn, yet characters choose and bear responsibility. Cassius's line about the stars puts the burden on human choice.
Verified Quotes
Frequently cited
“Beware the Ides of March”
Frequently cited
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings”
Frequently cited
“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous”
“It must be by his death: and for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general”
“Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream”
Frequently cited
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once”
“But I am constant as the northern star”
Frequently cited
“Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”
Frequently cited
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”
Frequently cited
“The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones”
Frequently cited
“There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune”
Frequently cited
“This was the noblest Roman of them all”
“His life was gentle, and the elements So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, “This was a man”
Medical Lens
Shakespeare gives Caesar the falling sickness (epilepsy), which Plutarch records, and a deaf ear he invents, so the would-be god is shown in a frail body. Brutus suffers sleeplessness and inner turmoil before the murder; Calphurnia's dreams and the ghost raise questions of omen and imagination. Portia's self-wounding and her death by swallowing fire, and the suicides of Cassius, Titinius and Brutus, follow Roman ideas of honorable death, which the play presents without endorsement. Antony's final tribute to Brutus's well-mixed elements uses the language of humoral temperament.
- Act 1, Scene 2
Casca reports that Caesar fell down in the market-place and foamed at the mouth; Brutus says he has the falling sickness. Caesar also tells Antony he is deaf in one ear.
- Act 2, Scene 1
Brutus has not slept since Cassius first stirred him and compares the interval before the deed to a hideous dream; Portia notes his sickness of mind.
- Act 2, Scene 2
Calphurnia's dream of Caesar's statue running blood, and Decius's flattering reinterpretation.
- Act 4, Scene 3
Brutus reports that Portia, distracted by grief and fear, swallowed fire; Caesar's ghost then appears to him at night.
- Act 5, Scenes 3 and 5
Cassius has Pindarus kill him, Titinius kills himself, and Brutus runs on his sword.