His point is that Cassius (the 'hot friend cooling') lacks sincerity the force of his simile is powered by the connection of alliterated /h/ sounds across Brutus's dialogue: /h/ast.

Even as he claims to preserve the Roman Republic by killing Caesar, he hastens its descent into empire.īrutus makes a simile comparison between his “hollow,” or insincere, men and over-eager horses that are difficult to handle when first mounted. Never one to miss a chance for irony, however, Shakespeare gives this allusion to Cassius: in casting his criticism of Caesar in terms of Aeneas and Anchises, Cassius anachronistically references the literary world of the Roman Empire that will come about as a result of his impending assassination of Caesar. By alluding to the Aeneid in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare therefore makes a self-conscious reference to literature’s ability to speak truth to power. In much the same manner, Shakespeare writes Julius Caesar during the Elizabethan period to offer a critique of the state of England at the time. Virgil writes the Aeneid during Augustus’s reign and weaves references and critiques of his regime into the fabric of the epic poem. The first Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus (the character Octavian in the play), is Julius Caesar’s great-nephew. Historically, the assassination of Julius Caesar (depicted in Julius Caesar) led to a series of political upheavals in Rome that dissolved the Roman Republic and transformed it into the Roman Empire. This may have been deliberate, however, as there is a complex interrelation between the Julius Caesar, Virgil’s motivation for writing the Aeneid, and the circumstances surrounding Shakespeare’s composition of his own version of events in Julius Caesar. Shakespeare’s allusion to the stories of the Aeneid would appear to be an anachronism, as Virgil wrote the poem decades after Caesar’s death. Shakespeare’s allusion mirrors the structure of epic poetry, as well: Cassius makes this comparison in the form of the very sort of epic simile (a multi-line simile with the general structure of “as… so…”) that might be found in the Iliad, the Odyssey or the Aeneid. The poem tells the story of Aeneas’s escape from Troy in the aftermath of the Trojan war, and his journey across the Mediterranean to the Italian peninsula where he eventually founds Rome.

Homer mentions Aeneas in the Iliad, but the hero eventually gets an epic of his own in Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas and his father, Anchises, are two legendary figures in Greco-Roman myth.

Julius caesar quotes act 2