JULIUS CAESAR

A monologue from Act III, Scene ii

by: William Shakespeare

ANTONY: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus

Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.

If it were so, it was a grievous fault,

And grievously hath Caesar answered it [1].

Here under leave of Brutus and the rest

(For Brutus is an honorable man;

So are they all, all honorable men),

Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.

He was my friend, faithful and just to me;

But Brutus says he was ambitious,

And Brutus is an honorable man.

He hath brought many captives home to Rome,

Whose ransoms did the general coffers [2] fill.

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?

When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept;

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And Brutus is an honorable man.

You all did see that on the Lupercal [3]

I thrice presented him a crown,

Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?

Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And sure he is an honorable man.

I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,

But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause.

What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?

O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason! Bear with me.

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me.

Purchase this play!

1 paid the ultimate penalty

2 public treasury

3 a cave or grotto at the foot of the Palatine, in which, according to legend, the she-wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. It seems to have been a sanctuary of some sort, and had a monumental entrance, for its restoration by Augustus is recorded.