Episode #241 ... The Tragedy of Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com/philosophizethis. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. Hope you love the show today. So the following here is a guide for someone that's wanting to know more about the philosophy written into the tragedy of Julius Caesar, a play written by William Shakespeare. Because there's a lot he wanted to say in this play about political violence, about the irony of living your life based on a moral ideal, about the importance of actually asking the correct questions when it comes to rhetoric and its impact on mass psychology. And out of respect to your time, I just want to get right into the story today and talk about how Shakespeare makes a drama or a tragic play out of the actual assassination of Julius Caesar that occurred in the real world. Should be said, there's certainly plenty about this play that's not historically accurate. But look, it is truly impressive how much Shakespeare works in real people and events that were close to Julius Caesar when he was killed. All of this Shakespeare takes mostly from the historian Plutarch, for whatever it's worth, and his description of what happened in Rome all those years ago. Anyway, all these characters are going to be critical for understanding what he was going for, and we'll understand it by the end of this episode. The play begins, the curtain opens, and the first thing we see is a giant party that's going on in the streets of Rome. A mass of people have taken to the streets and are cheering and celebrating the return of Julius Caesar and his army. See, Rome's a society at this point. It's in a pretty messy situation internally. In the decades leading up to this moment, Rome has had a few civil wars. Tyrants have ascended to power. They've been overthrown by other tyrants. There's a lot of infighting about what the direction is that the country should be going in. But in the current moment, though, Rome is a republic, at least for now. And the whole point of a republic to Rome is that no one person is gonna run everything. Power is something that gets spread out across multiple different offices and councils, and the people of a republic are supposed to show up and argue on behalf of what they think is best for the city. In other words, despite whatever real fundamental differences may exist between the citizens, there's importantly always in a republic an agreement among them that they want to find a way to work together on it. But when Caesar's returning with his army here and the people are in the streets celebrating it, the play begins with two elected officials that are watching this party going on, and they're commenting on how dangerous this all seems to be for the health of the Republic. Look at how fickle and easily influenced the crowd is, they …