Julius Caesar: Brutus, Cassius and the Fall of the Republic

Five years before Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy appeared, Lewes Lewkenor had written about Caesar’s rise, assassination and funeral, citing Plutarch, Appian and Lucan. His account moves through warnings ignored, Calpurnia’s fears, betrayal beneath Pompey’s statue and the bloody garment with which Antony turns the Roman people towards revenge.

Lewkenor’s Roman histories

In 1594 Lewes Lewkenor published The Resolved Gentleman, translating Hernando de Acuña’s Spanish adaptation of Olivier de La Marche’s moral allegory.

His accompanying historical material moves through biblical, classical and European examples of ambition, courage, Fortune and death. Cain and Abel, Samson and Delilah, ancient rulers and European princes enter the same examination of worldly greatness.

Among those histories is Julius Caesar. Lewkenor identifies Plutarch, Appian and Lucan in his marginal references.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, generally dated to 1599, draws principally upon Plutarch through Thomas North’s English translation. Lewkenor’s earlier account allows us to compare another English writer’s selection and treatment of the same Roman material.

Military glory becomes political danger

Lewkenor begins with the transformation of Caesar’s military reputation into a threat to the Senate. Caesar has:

…filled the whole circuit of the world with the greatness of his renown…

His greatness has become formidable. The Senate requires him to leave his army behind:

…they sent him word, that if he would leave his forces behind, and come unarmed and peaceable to the city, they would grant that or any other his lawful request: but particularly they commanded him not to pass the river of Rubicon with his army, threatening him, if he should otherwise do, to hold him as an enemy to his Country…

Lewes Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), historical account of Caesar; quotations follow the transcription in the master manuscript.

Caesar crosses the river. Pompey and much of the Roman nobility flee, and Caesar pursues them to Pharsalia.

The account establishes the political problem that remains central to the tragedy: military achievement has raised one citizen above the institutions of the republic.

Appian and the assassination

Appian’s history places the assassination within the civil conflicts that destroyed republican government. The 1578 English translation describes Brutus and Cassius as acting:

…either for envy of his greatness, or for zeal of their country…

The passage continues:

Brutus and Cassius, either for envy of his greatness, or for zeal of their country, killed him in the Senate house, being most accepted to the people, and most expert in government. The people, of all other, most lamented him, & required his strikers to be punished: they burned his body in the common place, where they erected a temple, and sacrificed unto him as to a God.

Appian, An Ancient History and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romans’ Wars (1578), “Preface of the Author”; quotation as transcribed in the master manuscript.

Envy and patriotic zeal give the assassination its ambiguity. Are the conspirators defending liberty, protecting their own standing or pursuing both ends together?

Shakespeare develops that question through the contrasting motives of Brutus and Cassius.

Brutus and the fear of monarchy

Brutus recognises Caesar’s achievements but fears what absolute power might make of him. His argument concerns the possibility of future tyranny:

It must be by his death: and for my part,
I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general.

Julius Caesar, Act II, scene i.

He imagines Caesar as a serpent’s egg that must be destroyed before it hatches. The reasoning creates the tragedy’s moral contradiction: the defence of lawful government becomes a justification for murder.

Lewkenor’s account also makes the possession of power insecure:

But so unsure is the seat of honour, especially being wrongfully usurped, that no following virtue can promise security to him that therein sitteth…

The Resolved Gentleman, account of Caesar.

The sentence follows Caesar’s generosity and pardons. Benefits bestowed after the seizure of power cannot guarantee the loyalty of those who receive them.

Cassius and the politics of envy

Cassius remembers Caesar’s physical weakness and resents the reverence now paid to him:

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Julius Caesar, Act I, scene ii.

Political inequality becomes a physical spectacle. Caesar towers over men who once considered themselves his equals.

Cassius’s resentment is personal and political. He seeks the dignity of the republic and his own place within it. Appian’s distinction between envy and zeal for the country gives a concise formulation of the motives Shakespeare allows to overlap.

Warnings and Calpurnia’s dream

Lewkenor records Caesar’s refusal to believe the warnings:

…he had received many advertisements of this conspiracy, but would not believe any…

He then turns to Caesar’s wife:

…nor yet regard the pitiful tears of his wife Calphurnia; who the night before the murder, dreamed that he was slain and murdered in her arms…

She begs him to stay at home:

…and therefore with all humbleness on her knees besought him to stay at home that day…

The Resolved Gentleman, account of Caesar.

Shakespeare gives these warnings a sequence of dramatic encounters, beginning with:

Beware the ides of March.

Caesar later recalls Calpurnia’s cries:

Nor heaven nor earth have been at peace to-night:
Thrice hath Calphurnia in her sleep cried out,
“Help, ho! they murder Caesar!”

Her appeal becomes direct stage action:

Alas, my lord,
Your wisdom is consumed in confidence.
Do not go forth to-day: call it my fear
That keeps you in the house, and not your own.
We’ll send Mark Antony to the senate-house:
And he shall say you are not well to-day:
Let me, upon my knee, prevail in this.

Julius Caesar, Act I, scene ii, and Act II, scene ii.

In Lewkenor’s prose and Shakespeare’s scene, Caesar’s confidence defeats the warnings that might preserve him.

The Senate House

Lewkenor describes Caesar’s destruction by men he had pardoned and advanced:

…Caesar in the height of his glory, when he knew no enemy to fear, was of a sudden overtaken by a secret conspiracy of his friends, among which were also Brutus and Cassius; the first of which he loved so well, that he had in his testament ordained him to be one of his heirs; in fine, he was by them inhumanely murdered in the senate house, directly under a pillar whereupon stood the statue of Pompey…

The Resolved Gentleman, account of Caesar.

Shakespeare stages the murder during a meeting of the Senate. The conspirators approach through a petition, surround Caesar and kneel before him.

Gestures of submission conceal the attack. The ceremonial forms that should recognise authority provide access to its holder and become the means of destroying him.

Lewkenor’s later office as Master of the Ceremonies gives an additional biographical interest to this manipulation of rank, access and formal behaviour.

The funeral speeches

Brutus initially persuades the Roman people that Caesar’s ambition threatened their liberty. Antony then turns their judgement through a speech that appears to respect the conspirators while dismantling their justification.

His repeated phrase changes its force:

Brutus is an honourable man.

Lewkenor describes Antony’s oration through its effect upon the spectators:

M. Antonius made his funeral oration, which he mingled with so many passionate and pitiful speeches, and at the conclusion thereof, with weeping eyes showing his bloody shirt unto the people…

The Resolved Gentleman, account of Caesar’s funeral.

Shakespeare gives the garment an extended dramatic history:

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent,
That day he overcame the Nervii:
Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb’d…

Antony brings the speech back to the statue:

Even at the base of Pompey’s statua,
Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell.

Julius Caesar, Act III, scene ii.

The garment makes betrayal visible. Public speech becomes an encounter with the physical evidence of murder.

Appian’s Roman crowd

Appian records the people’s grief and demand that Caesar’s killers be punished. Lewkenor’s account follows the movement from Antony’s speech into collective action:

…did so stir their minds to so high a degree of commiseration, that filling the air with lamentable outcries, they took the flaming brands, and ran about the town, setting fire on the conspirator’s houses: who fearing the fury of the enraged multitude, betook themselves to flight, but few of them, or none, escaped punishment by one violent death or other.

The Resolved Gentleman, account of Caesar’s funeral.

Shakespeare gives the crowd its own cries:

We will be revenged.

Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!
Let not a traitor live!

Julius Caesar, Act III, scene ii.

The conspirators expect the murder to restore liberty. Instead, public grief becomes vengeance and further civil conflict.

Antony understands the crowd more effectively than Brutus. The speech gives political direction to emotions the conspirators have failed to anticipate.

The power of public speech

Lewkenor also examines the relationship between rulers and subjects in The Estate of English Fugitives. He recalls Buckingham’s attempt to persuade London’s citizens to acclaim Richard III.

The citizens’ refusal to respond defeats the elaborate speech and manufactured applause. Loyalty cannot simply be commanded into existence.

The contrast with Antony is revealing. Buckingham cannot produce the response he needs; Antony turns the emotional relationship between Caesar and the Romans into an instrument of power.

In both narratives, an orator attempts to make political authority visible through the audience’s response. Shakespeare’s tragedy makes the struggle over Rome a struggle over what its people will believe and do.

Lucan and the Roman civil wars

Lucan’s Pharsalia recounts the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. The catastrophe comes from Romans turning their power against one another.

Lewkenor’s inclusion of Lucan among his authorities places his Caesar narrative within that wider interpretation of civil conflict.

Shakespeare’s conspirators intend to preserve the political community, but their violence leads towards Philippi and the destruction of their cause.

The tragedy measures the gap between claims of public service and the consequences of personal ambition.

The ghost of Caesar

Caesar’s death fails to end his power over the action. His ghost appears to Brutus before the final battle:

Art thou some god, some angel, or some devil,
That mak’st my blood cold and my hair to stare?

Julius Caesar, Act IV, scene iii.

The apparition identifies itself as Brutus’s evil spirit and promises another meeting at Philippi.

The deed through which Brutus sought liberty returns as a presence he cannot dismiss. Caesar’s death governs the events leading to his own destruction.

The scene also belongs beside the moral and supernatural literature Lewkenor translated. The Resolved Gentleman examines ambition, Fortune and death; The Spanish Mandeville of Miracles enters the literature of apparitions and extraordinary occurrences.

Shakespeare makes the dead ruler’s continuing influence visible upon the stage.

Brutus and the final resolution

At Philippi, Brutus chooses death rather than capture. His last words acknowledge Caesar:

Caesar, now be still:
I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.

Julius Caesar, Act V, scene v.

Brutus’s courage cannot repair the consequences of his decision. The assassination undertaken in the name of liberty has led to military defeat and his own death.

His final resolution belongs beside the classical examples of courage and mortality in Lewkenor’s book. Shakespeare’s tragedy preserves the honour of the man while exposing the disastrous consequences of his political judgement.

The Roman histories and Shakespeare’s later plays

The connection extends across a body of Roman history. Appian’s preface moves from Coriolanus and his exile through Caesar, Pompey, Brutus and Cassius to the struggle between Octavian, Antony and Cleopatra.

Lewkenor’s marginal references direct readers towards authorities whose histories supply the political world of several Shakespearean tragedies.

The Resolved Gentleman records his engagement with that material in 1594. Its selection of rulers and reversals belongs beside Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.

Caesar’s rise and death become part of a larger examination of allegiance, ambition, civil war and the instability of greatness.

The cumulative Julius Caesar case

Lewkenor’s account preserves a substantial sequence: military glory becomes political danger; the ruler ignores warnings; friends turn against their benefactor; Calpurnia pleads; Caesar falls beneath Pompey’s statue; Antony displays the bloody garment; grief becomes violence.

The ancient sources give that sequence its historical foundation. Lewkenor’s English prose and Shakespeare’s tragedy offer two treatments of it, five years apart.

Appian’s distinction between envy and patriotic zeal illuminates the conspirators’ motives. Lucan supplies the wider catastrophe of civil war. Lewkenor’s writing on public loyalty gives another perspective upon the orator and his audience.

The comparison follows a writer already selecting and interpreting the Roman histories that Shakespeare subsequently brought to the stage.

Continue:
Antony and Cleopatra — Empire, Passion and the Fall of Fortune →

Sources and Further Reading

Lewes Lewkenor, The Resolved Gentleman (1594), historical account of Julius Caesar and marginal references to Plutarch, Appian and Lucan. Quotations follow the transcriptions in the master manuscript.

Lewes Lewkenor, The Estate of English Fugitives (1595), account of Buckingham’s attempt to secure public acclaim for Richard III.

Appian, An Ancient History and Exquisite Chronicle of the Romans’ Wars (1578), “Preface of the Author” and the Roman civil wars.

Plutarch, Lives, particularly Caesar, Brutus and Antony; Thomas North’s English translation (1579).

Lucan, Pharsalia, concerning the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, particularly Acts I–V: the warnings, conspiracy, assassination, funeral speeches, apparition and final battle.

The Master of the Ceremonies, master manuscript, 18 October 2026: The Resolved Gentleman, Roman history and the Shakespearean Roman tragedies.

Illustrations: Peter Paul Rubens, Julius Caesar; Vincenzo Camuccini, The Death of Julius Caesar; the funeral oration illustration credited to H. E. von Berlepsh; The Estate of English Fugitives title page; Henry Fuseli, The Death of Brutus. Image records are linked in the captions.

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