Julius Caesar (Vol. 63) - Stephen M. Buhler (essay date 1996)
Stephen M. Buhler (essay date 1996)
SOURCE: “No Spectre, No Sceptre: The Agon of Materialist Thought in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 313-32.
[In the following essay, Buhler regards the Epicurean skepticism of Cassius in Julius Caesar as it illustrates the play's concern with political materialism.]
Postremo cur sancta deum delubra suasque discutit infesto praeclaras fulmine sedes, et bene facta deum frangit simulacra suisque demit imaginibus violento volnere honorem?
(Lucretius, De rerum natura 6.417-20: Lastly, why does he shatter holy shrines of the gods, and even his own illustrious habitations, with the fatal thunderbolt, why smash finely-wrought images of the gods and rob his own statues of their grandeur with a violent wound?)1
In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare...
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