Julius Caesar

Play

Julius Caesar

Summary

Gaius Julius Caesar is the great Roman general and would-be king whose assassination on the Ides of March (Act III) detonates the play's catastrophe — yet his presence, living and as ghost, haunts every subsequent scene. Shakespeare presents him with deliberate ambiguity: simultaneously a man of genuine greatness and of dangerous vanity, deaf to warnings and prone to speaking of himself in the third person as though already mythologised. The conspirators fear he will crown himself; whether that fear is justified Shakespeare deliberately leaves open. Assassinated by the conspirators at the Capitol, his spirit appears to Brutus at Philippi as an omen of defeat.

Notable Quotations

"Et tu, Bruté? — Then fall, Caesar!" *(3.1)*

"Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once." *(2.2)*

"I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true-fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament." *(3.1)*

"Beware the ides of March." *(1.2 — the Soothsayer's warning)*

Cross-references

• Julius Caesar — the play
• Tragedies
• character_brutus — the man who kills him for Rome
• character_cassius — the man who envies and plots against him
• character_mark_antony_jc — his devoted friend and avenger