'True fixed and resting quality': Senecan constancy

To be unmoved is the virtue of the Stoic sapiens, and this Senecan ideal is most splendidly evoked by Caesar just before his murder:

I could be well moved if I were as you.
If I could pray to move, prayers would move me.
But I am constant as the northern star,
of whose true fixed and resting quality
there is no fellow in the firmament.

(3. 1. 58-62)¹⁶

In declaring that he will not be 'moved', Caesar is making at least three claims: that he will not change his mind, is unmoved by emotion, and cannot be shaken by external pressures. The most obvious sense is the assertion of immovable will. Caesar refuses to change his decision about Cimber's banishment, and so 'turn preordinance and first decree' into childish capriciousness (38-9). Brutus later takes a very similar stand in refusing (with 'wonderfull constancy', as North commented) to pardon Lucius Pella (4. 2. 55 ff.). In either case, since the play withholds the facts about Cimber and Pella, we may commend their firmness of principle or condemn their obstinacy. It is clear that both Brutus and Caesar find a positive virtue in not changing their minds, refusing to be 'moved' in the sense (often used in the play) of 'urged' or 'persuaded'. Brutus is typical in expressing to Cassius his reluctance to '[b]e any further moved' (1.2. 167-8). The plebs, by contrast, are 'moved' (3. 2. 264) only too easily, and literally, by Antony's rhetoric.¹⁷

'Move' also, in these instances, implies the arousal of emotion. Caesar is denying that he 'bears such rebel blood' (40) as to be moved by emotive appeals. Brutus acknowledges that Caesar shares his own Stoic ideal of rationality: 'I have not known when his affections swayed / More than his reason' (2. 1. 20-1). It does not occur to him that to deny all 'affections' (emotions or friendships) may be as tyrannical as to be governed by them.¹⁸ Having himself acted on these principles in sacrificing his personal affection for Caesar to the public good, he is contemptuous of Cassius' appeals to love or anger:

Go show your slaves how choleric you are,
And make your bondmen tremble. Must I budge? . . .

By the gods,
You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you.

(4. 2. 99-100, 102-4)

The man who refuses to be moved by his own passions will not 'budge' in the face of Cassius'.¹⁹ He insists that emotions must be suppressed, even if the effect of that suppression is as painful and self-destructive as Portia's burning coals.

Brutus' Stoic view of emotion is most clearly seen in his advice to the conspirators on the frame of mind in which they must kill Caesar:

And, gentle friends,
Let's kill him boldly, but not wrathfully . . .
And let our hearts, as subtle masters do,
Stir up their servants to an act of rage,
And after seem to chide 'em.

(2. 1. 171-2, 175-7)

Brutus sums up the Senecan view that the wise man will do what is right 'boldly' but dispassionately. But the simplicity of this doctrine runs into confusion as Brutus, uneasily aware that you cannot kill a man in a spirit of calm reasonableness, ascribes the necessary emotion to the body rather than the heart or soul. The disjunction seems not only implausible but repellently hypocritical: Brutus' simile puts him in the position of one who orders a crime and then disclaims responsibility for it.²⁰

The play thus, in a very traditional way, calls into question Stoic apatheia. As Antony tells the plebeians, 'You are not wood, you are not stones, but men' (3. 2. 143); Stoic-stockish impassivity is neither humanly attainable nor desirable. In fact, as I have suggested, Shakespeare's Romans are not passionless. The plebs are governed by emotion; so is Antony, though he is also capable of manipulating both his own feelings and theirs to political ends; and the mob violence which results powerfully demonstrates the dangers of unrestrained passions. Restrained passions, however, can be equally dangerous. Those patricians who, unlike Antony, hold to the Roman code of rationality are in fact more strongly influenced by feelings than they are prepared to acknowledge. Immovable Caesar vacillates between the demands of fear, ambition, and dread of ridicule; shrewd Cassius sacrifices his tactical judgement to his reluctance to oppose the grieving Brutus; Brutus himself seems unaware how far his decision to kill Caesar is motivated by personal and family pride. The play has an almost Freudian sense of how emotion can work all the more powerfully because it is repressed.

The effect of Stoic constancy, then, is not to eradicate emotion but to repress it. When the word 'constancy' is explicitly used, it is most often in the context of concealment. Brutus' exhortation to 'formal constancy' comes as he advises the conspirators to conceal their true thoughts and feelings; when he urges Cassius to 'be constant' (3. 1. 22) it is because Cassius' panic threatens to reveal the plot. Portia makes 'strong proof of [her] constancy' by giving herself 'a voluntary wound' and concealing her pain (2. 1. 298-9)—proving herself more constant than Brutus, who has been unable to hide his perturbation from her. Later, fearful of letting slip a betraying word under the strain of waiting for news, she prays,

O constancy, be strong upon my side;
Set a huge mountain 'tween my heart and tongue.

(2. 4. 6-7)

Constancy is here conceived not as freedom from suffering but as repression of it; its function is to stop up the passage between feeling and expression. The power of the image is increased by the ambiguity of 'upon my side', which suggests an oppressive weight pressing upon the chest and heart.²¹ Constancy in Julius Caesar is not so much a superhuman imperviousness to pain as an ability to pretend to be impervious—like Seneca's gladiator who, though wounded, 'maketh shew that it is nothing' (Const. 16. 2).

The third sense of being 'unmoved' is the Stoic claim of indifference to external evils. Cassius sums up this doctrine when he tells Brutus, rather glibly, 'Of your philosophy you make no use, / if you give place to accidental evils' (4. 2. 199-200). The essence of stoic philosophy is to enable us to endure 'accidental evils' steadfastly, without 'giving place' to them, in the knowledge that such things are indifferent. Brutus uses the Stoic term when he claims to look on honour and death 'indifferently' (1. 2. 89),²² and Cassius picks it up when he tells Casca, 'I am armed, / And dangers are to me indifferent' (1. 3. 114).

The most obvious 'accidental evil', as in these passages, is death. Both Caesar and Brutus declare it indifferent. Caesar insists that it is not death ('a necessary end') but the fear of death that is an evil: 'Cowards die many times before their deaths' (2. 2. 32, 36). Brutus explains the Senecan technique of meditation on its inevitability: 'With meditating that she must die once, / I have the patience to endure it now' (4. 2. 244-6).²³ We are made aware, however, that Brutus' Stoic indifference to Portia's death is assumed, and a note of strained overstatement in Caesar's lines makes us suspect that he, too, does not find the fear of death as incomprehensible as he claims (2. 2. 34-7). Brutus' true feelings about death are perhaps revealed in the dialogue over Caesar's body:

BRUTUS. Fates, we will know your pleasures.
That we shall die, we know; 'tis but the time
and drawing days out that men stand upon.
CASCA. Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life
cuts off so many years of fearing death.
BRUTUS. Grant that, and then is death a abenefit.
So are we Caesar's friends, that have abridged
His time of fearing death.

(3. 1.99-106)

Caught in Casca's 'sophistical trap', Brutus skids from the claim that death is indifferent to the claim that it is positively desirable.²⁴ Senecan Stoicism, as we have seen, is always tempted towards a death-wish; Shakespeare's Romans too are tempted to see death as a positive relief from the strain of 'so many years of fearing death' and denying their fear.

Immovable will, passionlessness, indifference to pain and death: all of these aspects of Stoic constancy add up to a claim to rise above humanity, to 'escape man', in Montaigne's phrase. This aspiration is reflected especially in an exaltation of mind and spirit over body, seen in Brutus' reluctance to sleep (4. 2. 281-2) and Portia's voluntary wound; its ultimate act is suicide, the destruction of the body to preserve the mind. Set against it is the physical weakness of the characters: epilepsy, fever, deafness, short-sightedness, ague, insomnia, fainting, illnesses real and pretended. Episodes such as Caesar's epileptic fit at the moment of being offered the crown, and the fatal myopia of the 'great observer' Cassius (1. 2. 203), suggest nature reminding the Romans (again in Montaigne's words) of the 'mortalitie . . . and insipiditie' of the human condition, by forcing them to acknowledge flaws 'inexpugnable unto our reason, and to the Stoicke virtue' (2. 2).²⁵

The most extreme statement of this aspiration to divinity is, again, Caesar's Northern Star speech. As John Anson first pointed out, Caesar here echoes Lipsius' claim to 'that great title, the neerest that man can have to God, To be immooveable'.²⁶ He represents himself as the pole star (3.1. 60), the one unmoving point in a mutable world, and as Mount Olympus (74), an image of immovable bulk but also one which combines the connotations of Seneca's two images of constancy: the rock and the god. Caesar is thus more than human, while the rest of mankind, who are 'flesh and blood, and apprehensive' (67), possess only the lower attributes of humanity, in Lipsius' words 'the filth of the bodie and contagion of the senses'.²⁷ Indeed, as Anson noted, he betrays that he does not see himself as 'flesh and blood' when he declares that his blood cannot be 'thawed' or 'melt[ed]' (41-2); like the icy Angelo (another character who, as his name suggests, aspires to rise above humanity), Caesar 'scarce confesses / That his blood flows' (MfM 1.3. 51-2). Ice-cold and stone-hard, Caesar represents himself as the monstrous Stoic-stock of the anti-Stoic tradition. The hollowness of the claim, already implied by his vacillations in the previous scene, is made brutally clear when Olympus' and 'the Northern Star' are reduced to a 'bleeding piece of earth' (257) on the Senate floor.

The constancy of Brutus, Caesar's mirror-image,²⁸ is subjected to a less brutal critique. Though less prone than Caesar to claim godlike status, Brutus too seeks to rise above humanity by achieving an impossible degree of consistency, rationality, and imperturbability, 'armed so strong in honesty' that external threats pass by him 'as the idle wind' (4. 2. 124-5). It is an admirable ideal, yet its effect in practice is often to make him rigid, cruel, and (most of all) dishonest—since, although he cannot in fact be absolutely constant, he must pretend to himself and others that he is so.

Brutus (despite the claims of some anti-Stoic critics) is clearly neither evil nor mad; for that matter, even Caesar's invocation of the Northern Star is splendid as well as bombastic. The play's treatment of Senecan constancy is not unsympathetic; but it is shown to be a flawed ideal, not humanly attainable, and therefore liable to involve its adherents in continual pretence and self-deception. In Montaigne's formula, it is 'a profitable desire; but likewise absurd'.