![]() ![]() There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d ![]() The implication is that Caesar will allow for no one else to take his mantle or power away from him. Cassius’ point is that, as far as Rome and Caesar are concerned, there is room for only one man: Julius Caesar himself. There is a pun here on ‘Rome’ and ‘room’, which could be homophones in Shakespeare’s time: Rome was rhymed with both dome and doom. That her wide walks encompass’d but one man?Ĭassius employs rhetorical questions to drive his point further home: when has there ever been such a time in the history of the world, ever since the biblical flood (the story of which we have analysed here), when one man alone dominated the political scene? (Note: some editors amend ‘wide walks’ to ‘wide walls’, but Daniell advises against that, on the basis that we can find references to ‘wide walks’ elsewhere in Shakespeare, but never wide walls.) When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome, When went there by an age, since the great flood,īut it was famed with more than with one man? Rome, a once-great city and empire, appears to have lost its noble lineage, that such an ordinary man as Caesar (who wasn’t born into a family of good name) could have become so powerful. Cassius laments that the age in which they live has become so debased (‘Age, thou art shamed!’), that a general like Caesar could have raised himself to such a status. ![]()
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