Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar

Caesar stands at the center of Rome's political world, fresh from triumph, directing Antony to touch Calpurnia in the sacred race and dismissing a soothsayer's warning about the ides of March as the muttering of a dreamer. He reads Cassius as a lean, hungry observer who thinks too much and smiles too little, and admits that such men are never at ease while they behold a greater than themselves. His deafness in one ear, his superstition, and his appetite for ceremony make him both towering and touchable—which is exactly what makes the conspiracy against him imaginable.

Marcus Brutus

Brutus moves through Rome as the man everyone wishes would open his eyes to his own worth, the noble name Cassius needs to legitimize any conspiracy. He confesses to Cassius that he is vexed with private passions and forgets the shows of love to other men, which makes him recruitable and remote at once. When Antony kneels to him after the murder, Brutus answers with brotherly reverence and a promise that the swords have leaden points for him—a generosity that will prove far more dangerous than Cassius's suspicion.

Mark Antony

Antony opens the play as the athletic favorite who obeys Caesar's lightest word, then pivots into the most dangerous man in Rome by mourning Caesar publicly while privately vowing woe to the hand that shed his blood. He asks only to speak at the funeral, and Brutus grants it against Cassius's warning, believing a controlled oration will do no harm. Antony's genius is patience: he flatters the conspirators to their faces, then turns Caesar's wounds into a weapon the crowd cannot resist.

Caius Cassius

Cassius is the conspiracy's engine, a man Caesar himself distrusts for thinking too much and smiling too little, who works on Brutus by holding up a mirror and showing him the worth Rome is groaning for. He hates the idea of any single man towering above the rest, and he recruits through flattery, insinuation, and forged letters rather than open argument. His misgiving about letting Antony speak at the funeral falls shrewdly to the purpose, and Brutus overrules him—the first of many times Cassius will be right and ignored.

Octavius Caesar

Octavius enters the story as the young man Cassius dismisses as a peevish schoolboy, yet he speaks to Brutus and Cassius with a cold formality that already sounds like command. He refuses to accept that Caesar could die by traitors' hands unless he brought them with him, and he pledges his sword stays drawn until another Caesar has added slaughter to the sword of traitors. His arrival transforms a Roman quarrel into a dynastic war, and his composure in the face of older, louder men marks him as the future.

Casca

Casca is the conspiracy's plainspoken witness, the man Brutus and Cassius pluck by the sleeve for an unvarnished account of Antony offering Caesar the crown three times and Caesar refusing it three times, each refusal gentler than the last. He describes the rabblement hooting and throwing up sweaty night-caps with such contempt that his own honesty becomes a kind of insult. He is also the hand that strikes first in the Capitol, which makes his earlier mockery of Caesar's fainting fit curdle into something far grimmer.