The characters of Julius Caesar divide into the men who kill Caesar and the men who avenge him, and the play’s great surprise is that its title character dies halfway through, leaving Brutus, the most reluctant of the killers, at its center.
This guide explains every major character, grouped by the side they stand on, with their key lines and what drives each of them. For the plot, themes, and famous quotations, see our full guide to Julius Caesar.
At a Glance
Here are the main characters of Julius Caesar and their roles.
Caesar and His House
The man at the center of the conspiracy, and the wife who sees his death coming.
Julius Caesar
The most powerful man in Rome, just returned in triumph over the sons of his old rival, Pompey. He appears alive in only three scenes, yet the whole play turns on him. In public, he is a monument. He often speaks of himself in the third person (“Caesar shall go forth”), dismisses the soothsayer with “He is a dreamer,” and moments before his death compares himself to the one star that never moves: “But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.”
In private, the play keeps showing us the man behind the statue. He is deaf in one ear (“Come on my right hand, for this ear is deaf”), he collapses in a fit when the crowd cheers his refusal of the crown, and Cassius remembers him crying “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!” in the Tiber. He reads people well. He sees at once that “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. / He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.” Yet he is vain enough to be flattered out of his fears by Decius, and his last words are a cry of personal betrayal: “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.” Whether he really wanted to be king, the play leaves open. Casca, who watched him refuse the crown three times, thinks “he would fain have had it.”
Calpurnia
Caesar’s wife. In her first scene, she is barely a person to him: he tells Antony to touch her during the race of the Lupercal, since the elders say the barren, touched in this holy chase, “Shake off their sterile curse.” On the night before the ides, she cries out three times in her sleep, “Help, ho! They murder Caesar!”, and in the morning she begs him not to leave the house. She has never believed in omens, she says, “Yet now they fright me,” and she warns him that the heavens mark only great deaths: “When beggars die there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”
She reads her husband better than anyone. When he boasts that danger knows “That Caesar is more dangerous than he,” she answers, “Your wisdom is consumed in confidence,” and kneels until he agrees to stay home. For a moment, she wins. Then Decius arrives, retells her dream of Caesar’s statue running blood as a vision of glory, and shames Caesar into going. She does not appear again after that morning.
Brutus and His Household
The play’s true center, and the two people who know him best at home.
Brutus
Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s friend, is the conspirator everyone else needs. Casca says Brutus’s good name will turn their crime into virtue, “like richest alchemy.” From his first scene, he is “poor Brutus, with himself at war,” and he joins the plot not out of hatred but out of fear of what Caesar might become. Alone in his orchard, he admits he knows “no personal cause to spurn at him,” then decides to kill him anyway, like a serpent’s egg, before it hatches: “kill him in the shell.” His defense to the people is the play’s most famous piece of prose: “not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.”
His tragedy is that his virtues make him a poor conspirator. He refuses to let the plotters swear an oath, rules out Cicero, and spares Antony, because they must be “sacrificers, but not butchers.” He lets Antony speak at the funeral and overrules Cassius to march on Philippi, arguing that “There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” Each decision is principled, and several of them help destroy him. He dies on his own sword, held by his servant Strato, with Caesar’s name on his lips: “Caesar, now be still. / I killed not thee with half so good a will.” Over his body, Antony calls him “the noblest Roman of them all.”
Portia
Brutus’s wife, the daughter of Cato, a famous defender of the republic. She has watched her husband pace and sigh at night, and she will not be shut out. Kneeling, she asks whether she is only his wife “in sort or limitation,” and argues her case: “I grant I am a woman, but withal / A woman that Lord Brutus took to wife.” To prove she can keep a secret, she reveals that she has given herself “a voluntary wound / Here, in the thigh.” Brutus is moved to pray, “Render me worthy of this noble wife!”
On the morning of the murder, the strain shows. She sends Lucius running to the Senate before she has told him why, and admits, “How hard it is for women to keep counsel!” We hear of her death only in Act 4: in despair at Brutus’s absence and at the enemy’s growing strength, she “swallowed fire.” Oddly, the play reports her death twice, once from Brutus to Cassius and again from Messala to Brutus, who receives the news as if it were new. Scholars have long debated whether this is a revision left in the text or a deliberate show of Brutus’s self-control.
Lucius
Brutus’s boy servant, who is nearly always sleepy. He finds the anonymous letter in Brutus’s study, and he is the reason we see Brutus’s gentleness. On the night before Philippi, Brutus asks him to play, and when the boy falls asleep over his instrument, Brutus will not wake him: “I will not do thee so much wrong to wake thee.” Just before, he has promised him, “If I do live, / I will be good to thee.” Moments later, Caesar’s ghost appears.
The Conspirators
The men who plan and carry out the murder, with Brutus, on the ides of March.
Cassius
Caius Cassius, the organizer of the plot and its sharpest mind. His hatred of Caesar is personal. He remembers saving him from drowning in the Tiber and watching him shake with fever in Spain, and he cannot bear that “this man / Is now become a god.” He gives the play one of its most famous lines as he works on Brutus: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” He is also frank with himself. “Well, Brutus, thou art noble,” he says once Brutus has gone, and then plans to throw letters in different handwriting through Brutus’s window, as if from many citizens.
He is usually right, and he usually gives way. He wants Antony killed with Caesar (“Let Antony and Caesar fall together”), warns against letting Antony speak (“I know not what may fall. I like it not”), and opposes marching to Philippi, and each time Brutus overrules him. In their quarrel in Act 4, Brutus accuses him of having “an itching palm,” and Cassius’s hurt reply shows how much he loves his friend: “A friendly eye could never see such faults.” A follower of Epicurus who once scorned omens, he begins to believe in them on his birthday at Philippi. He dies on that same day through a misunderstanding, thinking his friend Titinius captured, and has his servant Pindarus kill him with the sword he used on Caesar: “Caesar, thou art revenged, / Even with the sword that killed thee.”
Casca
A sour, blunt-spoken conspirator who tells Brutus and Cassius, in prose, how Caesar refused the crown three times. He is scornful of everyone, the crowd’s “stinking breath” and Cicero alike. Asked what Cicero said, he replies with a phrase the play gave to English: “for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” He also brings the news that the tribunes Marullus and Flavius “are put to silence.”
Yet the storm on the night before the ides terrifies him. He has seen a lion near the Capitol and a slave whose hand burned without scorching, and he takes them for warnings. At the murder, he strikes first, with the cry “Speak, hands, for me!” Antony never forgets it. At Philippi, he reminds the conspirators how “damned Casca, like a cur, behind / Struck Caesar on the neck.”
Decius Brutus
A conspirator Caesar trusts, and the one who brings him to the Capitol. He knows exactly how to handle him. Caesar loves to hear that he hates flattery, Decius explains, and “He says he does, being then most flattered.” When Caesar decides to stay home because of Calpurnia’s dream, Decius turns the dream around: the bleeding statue, he says, “was a vision fair and fortunate,” a sign that Rome will draw new life from Caesar.
Then he adds the two arguments Caesar cannot resist: the Senate means to offer him a crown that very day, and if he stays home, people will whisper, “Lo, Caesar is afraid.” Caesar is ashamed of his fears and calls for his robe. Artemidorus’s letter of warning names him plainly: “Decius Brutus loves thee not.”
The Other Conspirators
Cinna carries out Cassius’s errand, planting the anonymous papers where Brutus will find them, and after the murder cries, “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” Metellus Cimber gives the killers their chance by kneeling to plead for his banished brother, so that the others can crowd around Caesar. Trebonius draws Antony out of the way before the stabbing, and Caius Ligarius, sick and wearing a kerchief, throws it off the moment Brutus hints at the plan: “I here discard my sickness.”
Caesar’s Avengers
The three men who rule Rome after the murder and hunt down the conspirators.
Mark Antony
Caesar’s devoted friend, whom the conspirators badly underestimate. Brutus dismisses him as a man “given / To sports, to wildness, and much company,” and even Caesar notes that he loves plays and revels late. After the murder, he shakes each killer’s bloody hand, and then, alone with the body, shows what he really feels: “O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.” He prophesies civil war, with Caesar’s spirit to “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”
His funeral speech, which begins “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” is the turning point of the play. He repeats “Brutus is an honorable man” until the words become an accusation, claims “I am no orator, as Brutus is,” shows the crowd Caesar’s wounds, and reads his will, until the people riot. Then the play shows what he does with power. In Act 4, he condemns his own nephew to death on a list of enemies (“with a spot I damn him”) and sends Lepidus for Caesar’s will so they can “cut off some charge in legacies,” the same will he waved before the crowd. At the end, standing over his enemy’s body, he is generous again: Brutus, he says, was “the noblest Roman of them all.”
Octavius
Caesar’s young great-nephew and heir, known to history as Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. He arrives in Rome just as the riot begins and joins Antony and Lepidus to rule. He says little, but he already gives orders. When Antony tells him to take the left side of the field at Philippi, he answers, “Upon the right hand, I; keep thou the left,” and when Antony protests, he replies coolly, “I do not cross you, but I will do so.”
Cassius sneers at him as “A peevish schoolboy.” Yet the name Caesar has already passed to him. At Philippi, Antony addresses him simply as “Caesar,” and he vows not to sheathe his sword until Caesar’s wounds are avenged. The murdered man’s name outlives the men who killed him.
Lepidus
The third member of the ruling alliance. He agrees to his own brother’s death on the list of the condemned, on condition that Antony’s nephew die too. As soon as he leaves the room, Antony dismisses him as “a slight, unmeritable man, / Meet to be sent on errands,” and compares him to a horse that must be trained and driven. The scene shows the new rulers of Rome bargaining over lives, only a short time after Antony’s speech about the evil that men do.
The Voices of Rome
The warners, the tribunes, and the crowd, who show the story from the street.
The Soothsayer and Artemidorus
Two strangers who try to save Caesar. The soothsayer calls out from the crowd, “Beware the ides of March,” twice, and on the day itself he is waiting. When Caesar remarks, “The ides of March are come,” he answers, “Ay, Caesar, but not gone.” Artemidorus has written a letter that names every conspirator and ends, “If thou beest not immortal, look about you.”
Artemidorus even presses it on Caesar in the street, begging him to read it first because it “touches Caesar nearer.” Caesar’s grand reply seals his fate: “What touches us ourself shall be last served.” His public image, the ruler who puts others first, stops him from reading the one paper that could have saved him.
Flavius and Marullus
Two tribunes who open the play by scolding the workmen celebrating Caesar’s triumph. Marullus reminds them that they once cheered Pompey the same way: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” The tribunes then go to strip Caesar’s statues of their decorations. The next we hear of them, from Casca, is that they have been “put to silence.” The first scene already shows how fickle the crowd is and how dangerous it is to oppose Caesar.
The Plebeians and Cinna the Poet
The common people of Rome are a character in their own right. After Brutus’s speech, they shout, “Let him be Caesar,” praising the man who has just killed Caesar for wanting to be one. Minutes later, Antony turns them into a mob that sets out to burn the conspirators’ houses.
Their first victim is Cinna the poet, who has nothing to do with the plot. He tells them, “I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!” and one of them answers, “Tear him for his bad verses.” The scene is short, cruel, and grimly funny, and it shows what Antony’s speech has unleashed. Poets fare badly in this play: in Act 4, another poet who tries to make peace between Brutus and Cassius is thrown out of the tent.
A Closer Reading: Brutus in the Mirror
Brutus spends the play seeing himself only in the mirrors other people hold up for him, and the last mirror belongs to the man who defeated him.
It starts with a question. “Tell me, good Brutus,” Cassius asks, “can you see your face?” Brutus answers, “No, Cassius, for the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things.” Cassius has the offer ready: “I, your glass, / Will modestly discover to yourself / That of yourself which you yet know not of.” But the glass is rigged. That same night, Cassius plans to throw letters through Brutus’s window, written as if by many citizens, and the one Brutus opens tells him, “Brutus, thou sleep’st. Awake, and see thyself!” He reads the reflection he has been handed as the voice of Rome, and answers it: “O Rome, I make thee promise.”
From then on, Brutus thinks about how the murder will look. The killers must “carve him as a dish fit for the gods,” so that the deed, “so appearing to the common eyes,” will make them “purgers, not murderers.” He tells the plotters to hide their purpose “as our Roman actors do.” Even after the killing, with their hands washed in Caesar’s blood, Cassius imagines their audience: “How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown!”
Caesar is the opposite case. He needs no mirror, because he has already turned himself into an image: “for always I am Caesar.” The play surrounds him with statues. Calpurnia dreams of his statue running blood, the tribunes strip his statues bare, and Antony tells the crowd that he fell “at the base of Pompey’s statue.” The conspirators can kill the man, but not the image, which passes to Octavius along with his name.
Brutus gets his reflection in the end, and it comes from his enemy. Standing over his body, Antony says that the other conspirators acted out of envy, and only Brutus out of honest care for the common good: “This was the noblest Roman of them all.” It is the face Brutus wanted all along, and he never sees it. His servant Strato supplies the other half of the verdict: “For Brutus only overcame himself, / And no man else hath honor by his death.” The man first seen “with himself at war” wins that war only by killing himself. Our full guide to Julius Caesar follows how Caesar’s spirit outlives the men who killed him.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in Julius Caesar, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in Julius Caesar?
Brutus, in the view of many readers and critics. Caesar gives the play its title, but he is killed in Act 3 and appears alive in only three scenes. Brutus is present from the first act to the last, and the play follows his choices and their cost, which is why he is usually seen as its tragic hero.
Who Are the Conspirators in Julius Caesar?
The play names eight: Brutus, Cassius, Casca, Decius Brutus, Cinna, Metellus Cimber, Trebonius, and Caius Ligarius. Cassius organizes the plot, Brutus leads it, and Casca strikes the first blow.
Why Does Cassius Hate Caesar?
Partly on principle, since he fears Caesar will make himself king, and partly from envy. He has seen Caesar weak, sick, and nearly drowning, and he resents having to bow to a man he thinks no better than himself. As he puts it, “Caesar doth bear me hard, but he loves Brutus.”
Who Is “the Noblest Roman of Them All”?
Brutus. Mark Antony says it over his body at the end of the play, arguing that the other conspirators killed Caesar out of envy, while Brutus alone acted for the good of Rome.
How Does Portia Die?
Offstage. In Act 4, Brutus tells Cassius that, in grief at his absence and at the growing power of Antony and Octavius, she lost her mind and “swallowed fire.”
Related Reading
Three pages that take Julius Caesar further.