Julius Caesar (Vol. 85) | Marvin L. Vawter (essay date July 1973)
Marvin L. Vawter (essay date July 1973)
SOURCE: Vawter, Marvin L. “Julius Caesar: Rupture in the Bond.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72, no. 3 (July 1973): 311-28.
[In the following essay, Vawter contends that Julius Caesar should be understood as a critique not just of Caesar's tyrannical ambition or the malicious intent of the conspirators, but as a wholesale condemnation of the corrupted Roman nobility for its destruction of natural, communal bonds.]
Among the many questions raised in Julius Caesar, one of the most important is Cassius' rhetorical question to Brutus amidst his vehement characterization of Caesar:
Now in the names of all the gods at once, Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great?
(I.ii.146-48)
Cassius does not require an answer, for it is his way of conveying the enormity of Caesar's tyranny. In metaphors of physical size, he...
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