The themes of Julius Caesar all turn on one question: whether a good man can do a terrible thing for a good reason, and whether Rome, with its omens, its orators, and its changeable crowd, will let him call it good.
This guide explains the play’s major themes, with the key lines for each and how they connect. For the plot and famous quotations, see our full guide to Julius Caesar, and for everyone who appears in the play, see our guide to the Julius Caesar characters.
At a Glance
Here are the main themes of Julius Caesar in brief.
Power and Ambition
Caesar is murdered for ambition, but the play never proves he had any. What we see is ambiguous. According to Casca, he refused the crown three times, though “to my thinking, he would fain have had it.” Antony later reminds the crowd of the same moment to argue the opposite: “I thrice presented him a kingly crown, / Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?” The same event serves both sides.
Brutus’s own case against Caesar rests on the future, not the past. Alone in his orchard, he admits that he has “not known when his affections swayed / More than his reason.” His argument is about what power does to people: “lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,” and once a climber reaches the top, “He then unto the ladder turns his back.” So Caesar must die for what he may become, like a serpent’s egg killed “in the shell.” After the murder, Brutus announces, “Ambition’s debt is paid,” and tells the people, “as he was ambitious, I slew him.”
The irony is that ambition drives nearly everyone else. Cassius resents a man “no mightier than thyself or me.” Antony, once in power, bargains over who will die on his list of enemies. And Octavius, the heir who takes Caesar’s name, will become the emperor Brutus feared. The murder meant to stop one man’s rise clears the way for another’s.
Honor
No word matters more in the play. Brutus defines himself by it from his first scene: “Set honor in one eye and death i’ th’ other / And I will look on both indifferently,” he tells Cassius, for he loves “The name of honor more than I fear death.” Cassius, who knows his man, answers, “Well, honor is the subject of my story,” and uses that love of honor to draw him into the plot.
Brutus stays true to his idea of honor to the end, even when it costs him. He will not raise money “by vile means,” and he condemns Cassius for taking bribes in words that show how high he sets the bar: “I had rather be a dog and bay the moon / Than such a Roman.” He refuses to be led through Rome as a captive, and he dies by his own hand rather than surrender.
Antony shows how fragile the word is. In his funeral speech he repeats that “Brutus is an honorable man” until the crowd hears the phrase as an insult, and one of them answers, “They were traitors.” Our guide to “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” follows how he does it. Honor, the play suggests, is partly a matter of reputation, and reputation belongs to whoever tells the story. It takes Antony himself, at the end, to give Brutus his honor back.
Rhetoric and Persuasion
Almost every turn in the play happens because someone talks someone else into something. Cassius talks Brutus into the conspiracy, first in person and then with forged letters. Decius talks Caesar out of his wife’s fears, and he knows exactly which buttons to press: Caesar, he says, loves to be told he hates flatterers, and “He says he does, being then most flattered.”
The two funeral speeches are the play’s great contest. Brutus speaks in prose, in balanced, reasonable sentences: “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him. As he was fortunate, I rejoice at it. As he was valiant, I honor him. But, as he was ambitious, I slew him.” He appeals to the crowd’s judgment and wins them for a moment. Antony speaks in verse, and he appeals to their feelings. He weeps, shows them Caesar’s cloak and body, and holds back the will until they beg for it.
His finest trick is to deny that he is doing any of it: “I am no orator, as Brutus is.” If he were Brutus, he says, he would “put a tongue / In every wound of Caesar that should move / The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny,” which is exactly what he has just done. When the crowd runs off to burn the conspirators’ houses, he admits the speech was a weapon: “Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot.”
Fate and Free Will
Cassius states one side of the question in the play’s most quoted lines: “Men at some time are masters of their fates. / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” If Romans are ruled by Caesar, he means, it is their own doing, and they can undo it.
Caesar states the other. When Calpurnia begs him to stay home, he asks, “What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” He meets death with calm acceptance: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once,” since death, “a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.”
The play seems to hold both views at once. The conspirators choose freely, yet everything they do seems to have been foretold, down to the ides of March. By the end, even the free-willed Cassius half believes in omens, and Brutus, going into the last battle, can only wish to see what is coming: “O, that a man might know / The end of this day’s business ere it come!” His famous image of the “tide in the affairs of men” captures the balance. The tide is not his to control, but taking it “at the flood” is his choice, and, in this case, the wrong one.
Omens and Interpretation
Few plays are as full of warnings. A soothsayer calls out, “Beware the ides of March.” On the night before, a storm rains fire, a lion walks near the Capitol, and an owl hoots in the marketplace at noon. Calpurnia dreams of Caesar’s statue spouting blood, and the priests, sacrificing an animal, “could not find a heart within the beast.”
The signs are real, but no one reads them the same way. Cicero, in his one scene, puts the problem plainly: “men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.” Casca sees the storm as a warning from the gods. Cassius, who bares his chest to the lightning, turns it into a picture of Caesar himself, a man “Most like this dreadful night.” Caesar reads the heartless beast as a challenge to his courage (“Caesar should be a beast without a heart / If he should stay at home today for fear”), and Decius turns Calpurnia’s nightmare into “a vision fair and fortunate.”
Every character finds in the omens what he already wanted to see. At Philippi, the pattern turns on Cassius. Once a follower of Epicurus, who did not believe the gods sent signs, he now sees ravens, crows, and kites where eagles had been, and he goes into battle expecting to lose. The play leaves open whether the gods speak through such things, but it shows clearly that people hear in them the voice of their own hopes and fears.
Friendship and Betrayal
Caesar is not killed by enemies but by men he calls friends, and the play makes that the deepest wound. His last words are addressed to one of them: “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.” Antony builds his speech around the same betrayal. Pointing to the gash in Caesar’s cloak, he tells the crowd, “For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel. / Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him! / This was the most unkindest cut of all.”
Brutus insists that he loved Caesar even as he killed him (“I slew my best lover for the good of Rome”), and the play takes him at his word. For him, loyalty to a friend has to give way to loyalty to Rome. The cost of that choice shows in the friendship that remains, between Brutus and Cassius. In their quarrel in Act 4, they come close to breaking, and Cassius pleads, “A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities, / But Brutus makes mine greater than they are.”
They make up, and their farewell before the last battle is one of the most moving moments in the play: “Forever and forever farewell, Cassius. / If we do meet again, why we shall smile.” Cassius dies soon after, through a mistake about the fate of another friend, Titinius. A play that opens with friends killing a friend ends with Titinius and others dying out of loyalty to theirs.
The Roman Crowd
The common people appear in the first scene and turn the play in the middle. In the opening, the tribune Marullus scolds a crowd for celebrating Caesar’s triumph over Pompey’s sons, when they once cheered Pompey himself: “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” Casca, describing Caesar’s refusal of the crown, compares the crowd to a theater audience, clapping and hissing Caesar “as they use to do the players in the theater.”
After the murder, they prove how quickly they change. Brutus wins them over, and they cry that “Caesar’s better parts / Shall be crowned in Brutus,” praising the man who killed Caesar by offering to make him one. A few minutes later, Antony has them shouting, “Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay! Let not a traitor live!” Their first victim is Cinna the poet, killed because he shares a conspirator’s name.
The crowd is easily moved, but it is not powerless. The conspirators assume that Rome will see things as they do, and they are wrong. By the end of Act 3, Brutus and Cassius have fled the city. In this play, whoever can move the people holds power, which may be why the conspirators’ fate is sealed by a speech rather than a battle.
A Closer Reading: Constant as the Northern Star
Nearly everyone in Julius Caesar claims to be constant, and nearly everyone changes, which makes the crowd, openly changeable, the most honest body in Rome.
Caesar makes the grandest claim, moments before he dies. Refusing Metellus Cimber’s plea, he says, “But I am constant as the northern star, / Of whose true fixed and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.” He will not pardon Cimber’s brother, because “I was constant Cimber should be banished / And constant do remain to keep him so.” Yet, that same morning, he changed his mind twice. First, he agreed to stay home for his wife’s sake (“for thy humor I will stay at home”). Then, after Decius’s flattery, he reversed himself: “I am ashamed I did yield to them. / Give me my robe, for I will go.”
Portia claims constancy too. She proves it with a wound in her thigh: “I have made strong proof of my constancy.” On the morning of the murder, she has to pray for it: “O constancy, be strong upon my side; / Set a huge mountain ’tween my heart and tongue.” She dies, Brutus reports, after she “fell distract.”
The men of the conspiracy follow the same pattern. At the Capitol, as their nerve wavers, Brutus tells Cassius, “Cassius, be constant.” At Philippi, Cassius admits he has given up his philosophy (“Now I change my mind”) in the same speech in which he promises to meet all perils “very constantly.” Brutus condemns Cato’s suicide as “cowardly and vile” and says he will wait on the will of the gods, then, a few lines later, vows he will never be led through Rome as a captive. He ends by running on his own sword.
Brutus himself gives the key to all this. Before the murder, he tells the conspirators to hide their purpose and carry it off “as our Roman actors do, / With untired spirits and formal constancy.” Formal constancy is constancy of form: a steady face held up while the mind changes behind it. That is the Roman ideal the play tests, and it is why Caesar’s northern star shines so brightly just before he falls. Our guide to the Julius Caesar characters follows how each of them lives up to it, or fails to.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the themes of Julius Caesar, answered briefly.
What Are the Main Themes of Julius Caesar?
Power and ambition, honor, rhetoric and persuasion, fate and free will, omens and how people read them, friendship and betrayal, and the role of the crowd in politics. Most of them meet in Brutus, who kills a friend for the sake of honor and is undone by another man’s words.
Was Caesar Really Ambitious?
The play leaves it open. He refuses the crown three times, but Casca thinks he wanted it, and the Senate means to offer it again on the ides. Brutus admits he has never seen Caesar let his feelings overrule his reason, and he kills him for what he might become.
What Does “The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not in Our Stars” Mean?
Cassius means that the Romans cannot blame fate, or the stars, for their subjection to Caesar. It is their own weakness that makes them “underlings,” so they have the power to change it. He says it to persuade Brutus to act.
What Do the Omens Mean in Julius Caesar?
On the surface, they foretell Caesar’s murder and the conspirators’ defeat, and the events bear them out. But the play is more interested in how characters interpret them. Caesar, Casca, Cassius, and Decius each read the same signs in a different way, usually the way that suits them.
Why Does the Crowd Change Sides So Quickly?
Because each speaker gives them what they want. Brutus offers reasons, and they cheer him. Antony offers grief, Caesar’s wounds, and money from the will, and they riot. The play shows a crowd moved more by feeling than by argument.
Related Reading
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