Thread:Plasmapea010/@comment-29936716-20170822045756

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” This quote has a certain recognition never matched by any other Shakespearean quote. In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Antony is going to speak at Caesar’s funeral, shortly after conspirators – Brutus, Cassius and Casca – went to the Capitol to assassinate him. Antony, a very close friend of Caesar’s, goes to his funeral to give a speech to “bury Caesar, not to praise him”. However, if you were to analyze his speech, you would find that the exact opposite is accomplished. Antony follows Brutus’ earlier speech up by reminding the audience of Caesar’s greatness, and disproving what Brutus had said. Initially, Antony asserts that the reason Brutus said he killed Caesar – ambition – was never in him, noting that “he hath brought many captives home to Rome” whose ransoms were going to the city, he wept “when that the poor have cried”, and when Antony was brought to him to “present him a kingly crown”, instead of accepting it, he refused three times for the Romans to let him be crowned king. This is meant to show that Caesar is empathetic, but more importantly, you could not say that he was ambitious in any way. Also, he refers to Brutus often, playing down his speech by repeatedly referring to him as an “honorable man” while implying he was never honorable in the first place. This begins to become more obvious as the speech goes on, going so far at one point as to call the conspirators “traitors”. Afterwards, the focus of his speech begins to change. He mentions Caesar’s will, in order to appeal to the crowd’s sense of greed. He says if they read it, they would practically want to run over and “kiss dead Caesar’s wounds and dip their napkins in his sacred blood” and pass it around their families as a sign of their legacy. In other words, they will think of Caesar highly, and they will love him more than ever. He then sternly questions why the conspirators wanted to desert Caesar, to so commit treason against him and all of Rome, saying Caesar is “marred, as you see, with traitors”. As a final point, he also downplays his oratory skills, insisting he could never speak to persuade; he just tells facts and “only speaks right on”. Because of that, as he is going on speaking, the audience will start to believe the opposite about him – that he does speak to persuade. Finally, Antony notices that his words have galvanized the crowd into demanding to make the conspirators pay for their actions. He reminds them of something he brought up earlier: “You have forgot the will I told you of.” Wondering what treasures from Caesar await them, they cry out to see the will. Antony says that everyone will get “seventy-five drachmas” (~$1,900) – never even imaginable by today’s standards! Now everyone in the audience believes that, if he’s going to give everyone in Rome that amount of money, he must care very deeply about them all. To add on to that, Caesar’s private walks and paths have been left as public places – that is to say, “common pleasures, to walk abroad, and recreate yourselves”. Now, the crowd can say goodbye to any bad thoughts they had about Caesar before, and hello to a compassion that will never be matched. The audience has now been convinced of Caesar’s greatness, and they aren’t going to support Brutus’ viewpoint from this point forward. In conclusion, the purpose of Antony’s speech was to stress Caesar’s good qualities, and to berate Brutus and the other conspirators. In the beginning, he disproves what Brutus tried to tell the audience before – that Caesar’s ambition was the reason they killed him – by recounting a plethora of examples to the contrary. He also describes Brutus as an “honorable man”, telling a lie to imply that Brutus wasn’t actually honorable. In the middle, he questions what drove Brutus and the conspirators to kill such a good man. Finally, after insisting reading Caesar’s will would hurt them and be detrimental to them, he reads it. After the audience finds out that “he hath left you all his walks” and “seventy-five drachmas”, they are finally convinced of what Antony said. "Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?"  