Julius Caesar: Act 3 Commentary

Act 3 contains the most thrilling scenes in the play: Caesar’s assassination and Brutus’s and Antony’s dueling funeral orations about what that assassination means.

Five comments on the act:

1. Caesar is never more defiant than just before he dies. He compares the rest of the senators to mutable heavenly bodies and himself to the unchanging Northern Star. What remains of Caesar are his wounds, a testament to his body’s frailty. Antony will display Caesar’s body to get the Roman people to condemn what Brutus and his cohort have done.
2. Brutus makes clear that his master is Rome. Why did he kill Caesar? “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” He then goes so far as to say that he will gladly give his own life should Rome require it of him. He will have ample opportunity to make good that promise. By the time Antony is done, the Romans want Brutus’s head.
3. Brutus knew the stakes of the assassination in Act 2. It would be perceived as butchery when it was intended as sacrifice. Brutus says he did what he did for Rome. Antony calls it ingratitude. Brutus calls Caesar the traitor. He ambitiously wanted to take away Roman freedom. Antony calls the conspirators traitors. Caesar’s death with “move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.”
4. Brutus assumes that the violence will stop with Caesar’s death, that he and his conspirators can walk through the city streets waving their swords and saying, “Peace, freedom, and liberty” with no additional consequences. Antony shows that’s not possible. He provokes the crowd, and before the act is over, the poet Cinna is torn to shreds because the crowd thinks he was involved. The assassination has let loose the “dogs of war.”
5. Cassius’s best line in this act concerns the legacy of the assassination.

How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,

In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

The play demonstrates the line’s truth. What Cassius omits is how this scene will be interpreted. Brutus and Cassius are in the lowest circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. This play represents Cassius’s motives as much as it celebrates his actions. Ultimately, the conspirators provide no substantive defense of their actions. Antony can display Caesar’s body. They can only invoke Rome.