Ancient Roman History and the Plays of William Shakespeare

Around 1599, William Shakespeare wrote an historical tragedy about Julius Caesar, the celebrated military general and political leader of Ancient Rome. Plays based on the Classical Era were popular in Shakespeare’s time, and the story of Caesar’s illustrious life and his violent untimely death had become well-known in England through Plutarch’s Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans, translated into English by Thomas North and published in 1579.

Shakespeare however, as he so often did, made his version of an already well-circulated story the most famous. His Julius Caesar remains a core text on Caesar’s life to this day.

Stephen Greenblatt charts a steady evolution of Shakespeare’s writing technique through the history plays Richard the Third and Richard the Second to Julius Caesar, culminating ultimately in Hamlet. For Greenblatt, it’s Julius Caesar where Shakespeare hits upon a dramatic method for “the peculiar shorthand of the brain at work,” thereby conveying “the unmistakable marks of actual thinking.” This is of vital significance to Hamlet, in which Shakespeare’s presentation of the hero’s inner turmoil is widely regarded the most important aspect of this most famous play.

Julius Caesar therefore can be understood as a key moment in the ongoing development of Shakespeare’s creative genius.

Caesar was one of three men who together ruled the Roman Republic in the last century BC. The other members of this triumvirate were named Crassus and Pompey the Great. When Crassus died, Julius Caesar and Pompey perhaps inevitably became enemies. Caesar raised an army and marched upon Pompey in Rome, crossing a river called the Rubicon on his way there. In modern English, to “cross the Rubicon” still means to pass a point of no return, or to become committed to seeing your plans through.

Following a long war, Caesar defeated Pompey and so made himself the last surviving ruler of Rome. It’s at this point Shakespeare begins his play. Many Romans were becoming concerned that with just one man holding power over their entire nation, the Republic would become a dictatorship and the people would no longer be free.

Foremost among these was Marcus Junius Brutus, a trusted member of the Roman senate who may also have been Caesar’s son. History, however, would remember Brutus as the man who killed Julius Caesar.

In Shakespeare’s play the idea of assassinating Caesar comes not from Brutus but his brother-in-law Cassius, who also gives Brutus much encouragement from then on. It’s said that the historical Cassius was not as great or charismatic a man as Brutus, and so arranged for the latter to lead the revolution because he was more likely to be followed. From a psychoanalytical perspective, however, the relationship of Shakespeare’s Brutus and Cassius has fascinated many. Cassius can seem to be Brutus’s dark side, tempting him with violent urges and dreams of power.

Certainly, Brutus’s rationale for embarking on the conspiracy is a strange one. Caesar does nothing in the play to indicate he is going to be a cruel tyrant, and Brutus himself admits he is motivated only by the fear that Caesar might become such a dictator one day. In a famous passage, Brutus reasons that although a snake is dangerous, it cannot do harm until it has hatched from its egg. The only thing to do, therefore, is “kill him in the shell.”

All this can make Brutus start to sound like a man who secretly craves only power, and wishes to justify the bloodshed necessary to achieve it. If you know your Shakespeare, you might by now be remembering Lady Macbeth or Iago in Othello, both of whom stand Cassius-like beside the lead character of their respective plays and whisper violence in his ear. It’s often been observed that in conceiving of a self divided between the conscious and subconscious, Shakespeare anticipated Sigmund Freud by centuries.

Early in the play, a soothsayer tells Caesar to “Beware the Ides of March,” or as we would say today, March the Fifteenth. Brutus, Cassius and their supporters, believing in this prophecy and reading what they take to be other omens, therefore set the Ides of March as their date.

And so it was that on March the Fifteenth 44 BC, in the Senate House of Rome, Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times and left dead at the foot of Pompey the Great’s statue.

In Shakespeare’s version of the story, Caesar’s right-hand man Mark Antony here comes to the fore. Using his exceptional talent as a public speaker, Antony successfully turns the populace against Brutus and his men and drives them out of Rome. Thus does war break out between the conspirators and the Roman Republic. Both armies prepare to meet in final conflict at Philippi.

On the eve of the battle, in a device similar to one he had previously used in Richard the Third, Shakespeare has the Ghost of Caesar visit Brutus with ominous tidings. Sure enough, facing defeat at Philippi, both Brutus and Cassius commit suicide the Roman way. In a speech that he delivers immediately after the death of Brutus, Antony declares that although Cassius and the other conspirators did what they did only because they wanted power or envied Caesar, Brutus alone among them acted out of genuine concern for his people and love for Rome. To Antony, he was “the noblest Roman of them all.”

Here, with the Republic victorious and Caesar’s killers vanquished, Shakespeare ends his play.

Later events from this period in Classical history, however, supplied Shakespeare with material for a sequel. Antony and Cleopatra was written at some time before 1608, and like Julius Caesar it was mostly based on North’s translation of Plutarch. After Caesar’s death, Antony had become part of a new Roman triumvirate alongside Caesar’s adopted son Octavius and a senior general named Lepidus. On a visit of state to Egypt, Antony fell in love with Cleopatra the Seventh, greatest of all Egyptian queens, who had previously been the lover of Julius Caesar.

Antony’s shifting loyalties to Cleopatra made war between Egypt and Rome an imminent possibility. Historically and in Shakespeare, Octavius attempted by various means to bring Antony back to the Republic. However, it’s also known that he banished Lepidus, on what was probably a false charge. It’s more than likely therefore that Octavius saw this leadership crisis as an opportunity to seize absolute power over Rome. Certainly he has been remembered as a scheming power-hungry young upstart, although Shakespeare’s Octavius is not such an outright villain as some have made him.

At any event, Rome and Egypt did go to war, and Octavius’s forces triumphed over Antony’s at the Battle of Actium. In the aftermath both Antony and Cleopatra took their own lives. That is why Actium is called the last battle of the Roman Republic, for when the battle was over, there was no Republic anymore. All of Rome was in Octavius’s hands, and renaming himself Augustus Caesar he became the first Roman Emperor.

So in the end, by killing Julius Caesar, Brutus brought about the very outcome he had hoped to prevent. This sad historical irony is immortalized in Shakespeare’s great two-parter of Ancient Rome.