Who twice a day their withered hands hold up

Toward heaven, to pardon blood: and I have built

Two chantries where the sad and solemn priests

Sing still for Richard’s soul. More will I do,

Though all that I can do is nothing worth,

Since that my penitence comes after all,

Imploring pardon.

Julius Caesar

[II, i, 10–34] Ruthless in his high-mindedness, Brutus says that Caesar simply has to die. Alive, he is a threat to freedom, whatever his personal qualities may be:

It must be by his death; and, for my part,

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,

But for the general. – He would be crowned.

How that might change his nature, there’s the question.

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,

And that craves wary walking. Crown him! – that!

And then, I grant, we put a sting in him

That at his will he may do danger with.

Th’abuse of greatness is when it disjoins

Remorse from power; and, to speak truth of Caesar,

I have not known when his affections swayed

More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof

That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,

Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;

But when he once attains the upmost round,

He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees

By which he did ascend: so Caesar may;

Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel

Will bear no colour for the thing he is,

Fashion it thus: that what he is, augmented,

Would run to these and these extremities;

And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg

Which, hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous,

And kill him in the shell.

[II, i, 61–9] Cassius’ whisperings, says Brutus, have set off a civil war in his very nature:

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

I have not slept.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council; and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection.

[II, i, 77–85] If our cause is so just, says an uneasy Brutus, why such need for secrecy?

O conspiracy,

Sham’st thou to show thy dangerous brow by night,

When evils are most free? O then, by day

Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough

To mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy;

Hide it in smiles and affability;

For if thou path, thy native semblance on,

Not Erebus itself were dim enough

To hide thee from prevention.

[III, i, 254–75] After conciliatory words with Caesar’s killers, Mark Antony uses very different language over the body of his murdered friend:

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever livèd in the tide of times.