[In the following excerpt, Velz examines the ways in which previous scholars and critics have portrayed Shakespeare's conception of Greece and Rome.]

In 1680 Nahum Tate was quite positive about verisimilitude in Shakespeare: 'I am sure he never touches on a Roman Story, but the Persons, the Passages, the Manners, the Circumstances, the Ceremonies, all are Roman' [The Loyal Gentleman: A Tragedy]. This was a substantial (though not necessarily substantiated) claim, because Tate had just asserted that 'Nature will not do [a poet's] Business, he must have the Addition of Arts and Learning' : acquaintance with 'the Customs and Constitutions of Nations', and with much else, 'the Histories of all Ages', even 'the meanest Mysteries and Trades', 'because 'tis uncertain [whither] his subject will lead him'. Had Ben Jonson been alive to read Tate's opinion of Shakespeare's portraits of the Roman world, he would doubtless have said something memorably contemptuous. His own scholarly pretensions to exact local and temporal verisimilitude in Sejanus and 'well-laboured' Catiline are a commonplace of literary history; everyone knows also that Jonson once described Shakespeare's portrayal of Gaius Julius Caesar in the moments before his assassination as 'ridiculous'. The Tate school of thought has had some notable adherents, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson among the early ones, but the opposed assertion, that Shakespeare's Romans are Elizabethans in togas, has always been with us. From the time of John Dennis's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespear (1712) it has been a scholarly parlor game to enumerate Shakespeare's blunders in the Roman plays.

It may be rewarding to consider the question yet once again, expanding the terms to take in Shakespeare's Greek world. When we observe that the ancient world is the setting for just one third of the Shakespeare canon—two of the comedies, both of the narrative poems, four of the five romances, and six of the eleven tragedies—the exercise justifies itself. And though this article cannot claim to survey the history of opinion in any way fully, it may usefully point to some representative studies. It may be instructive to begin with comments on three or four major attempts in the past century to deal with the Tate/Jonson polarity.

Edward Dowden [Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875)]. tried to reconcile the two poles in 1875 in a statement that typifies the Romantic tradition in Shakespeare criticism:

While Shakspere is profoundly faithful to Roman life and character, it is an ideal truth, truth spiritual rather than truth material, which he seeks to discover … Shakspere was aware that his personages must be men before they were Romans … He knew that the buttressing up of art with erudition will not give stability to that which must stand by no aid of material props and stays, but if at all, by virtue of the one living soul of which it is the body.

We are a long way in such Platonism from Tate's Aristotelian insistence on the poet's acquaintance with 'the Customs and Constitutions of Nations'. Dowden transmits in his assertion the consensus of the nineteenth-century German aesthetic critics he so greatly admired, and he acknowledges his debt to the English Romantic tradition (Charles Knight in particular) as well. The legacy of Shakspere has been as long as its ancestry—my copy of the book (1962) is from the twenty-fifth printing, and I can clearly remember being told of Julius Caesar in school thirty years ago very much what Dowden says here of the spirit of Rome in Shakespeare. Dowden's stance may seem to us an evasion, rather more lofty than logical, but there is no doubt of its importance in cultural history.

M. W. MacCallum, writing in 1910 [in Shakespear's Roman Plays and Their Background (1910)], perceived the relation between 'truth material', and 'truth spiritual' in the Roman plays quite differently from Dowden. Pointing out (as Paul Stapfer had done before him [Shakespeare et l'Antiquité (1880)]) that Shakespeare is a very purist by comparison with those earlier Elizabethans (Thomas Lodge above all) who had dramatized Roman subjects, MacCallum declared:

No dramatist had been able at once to rise to the grandeur of the theme [of Roman history] and keep a foothold on solid earth, to reconcile the claims of the ideal and the real, the past and the present. That was left for Shakespeare to do.

There is in Shakespeare more of Rome, MacCallum argued, than of Scotland or of pre-Christian Britain. Poetic license is restrained in the Roman plays (sometimes even to the detriment of dramatic impact) because Shakespeare knew that events in those Roman stories had future consequences of immediate interest to his audience; hence his invented characters in the Roman plays are lesser figures (Lucius in Julius Caesar, Nicanor in Coriolanus, Silius in Antony and Cleopatra) who do not figure in the main action the way invented characters in Schiller's historical plays do.

Shakespeare on the one hand loyally accepted his authorities [in the English history plays and the Roman plays alike—and for the same reasons] and never deviated from them on their main route, but on the other he treated them unquestioningly from his own point of view, and probably never even suspected that their own might be different. This is the double characteristic of his attitude to his documents, and it combines pious regard for the assumed facts of History with complete indifference to critical research.…

But Shakespeare's loyalty to his sources

does not mean that in the Roman any more than in the English plays he attempts an accurate reconstruction of the past. It may even be doubted whether such an attempt would have been intelligible to him or to any save one or two of his contemporaries. To the average Elizabethan (and in this respect Shakespeare was an average Elizabethan, with infinitely clearer vision certainly, but with the same outlook and horizon) the past differed from the present chiefly by its distance and dimness; and distinctive contrasts in manners and customs were but scantily recognised. A generation later French audiences could view the perruques and patches of Corneille's Romans without any sense of incongruity, and the assimilation of the ancient to the modern was in some respects much more thorough-going in Shakespeare's England.…

Waving aside such anachronisms as striking clocks, Galenic medicine, and sweaty nightcaps as 'trifles that [do not] interfere with fidelity to antiquity,' MacCallum shrewdly observed that Shakespeare stressed just those elements in Roman society and culture (e.g., soldiers of fortune and the orgies of aristocratic decadence in Antony and Cleopatra) which appeared also in Renaissance society and culture.

There was a good deal of such correspondence between Elizabethan life and Roman life, so the Roman Tragedies have a breath of historic verisimilitude and even a faint suggestion of local colour. There was much less between Elizabethan life and Greek life, so Timon and Troilus and Cressida, though true as human documents, have almost nothing Hellenic about them.

Even in the Roman plays, he points out, Shakespeare is less at home when he portrays something (life in a republic, for example) which he had not experienced in his own culture.

MacCallum's book remains a landmark after nearly seventy years. In 1954 [in her Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama] Madeleine Doran was to reason in more general terms and with equal persuasiveness that the Renaissance habit of mind was to perceive and fuse analogues between the native and classical traditions. In such an eclectic frame, anachronism and anatopism become aesthetic merits, not naif oversights; and a proper critical stance, one that takes art in its own terms, will rather approve than condemn. In 1960 she went so far as to declare in a public lecture ['A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Metamorphosis', published in Rice Institute Pamphlets, XLVI, 4 (January 1960)] that the amalgam of Chaucer and Plutarch in the character of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream is entirely harmonious and that in general the Greek and English worlds of the play belong together more naturally than has been thought; in Shakespeare 'the present assumes the past'. Here, of course, is an implicit challenge to MacCallum's view of Shakespeare's Hellenism; other challenges will be discussed later in the paper.

As these accounts of the postures of MacCallum and Doran may suggest, the ground of argument has shifted in the twentieth century. From MacCallum's time, scholarship has gradually abandoned the question whether 'the Persons, the Passages, the Manners, the Circumstances, the Ceremonies' in Shakespeare are authentically Roman to ask instead whether Shakespeare and his audience thought them so. And the trend of commentary since the mid-nineteen-fifties has been with increasing frequency to answer, 'Yes'. The most impressive manifestation of the new scholarly stance came early and has been exemplary. In 1957 in a volume of Shakespeare Survey devoted to the Roman plays, T. J. B. Spencer showed that Shakespeare's portrait of Rome as a world of tumult and flux, of shouting crowds and violent events, is congruent with his generation's view of Roman history as a succession of 'garboyles'. ['Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans', Shakespeare Survey 10] If a Restoration critic like Tate thought Shakespeare's Rome authentic while his contemporaries Rymer and Dennis thought Shakespeare's Romans unpleasantly lacking in dignity, both had some reason. Yet Shakespeare is unlike his contemporaries, Spencer goes on, in emphasizing Plutarch's Republican vision of Rome: 'in spite of literary admiration for Cicero, the Romans in the imagination of the sixteenth century were Suetonian and Tacitan rather than Plutarchan'. It was the Empire, not the Republic, that provided moral exempta to the Renaissance. It can, in fact, be said that Titus Andronicus is a more representative 'Noble Roman Historye' by Renaissance standards than the other three of Shakespeare's Roman plays—it certainly has more garboyles. With some effort of the historical imagination, we must realize that it required individuality for Shakespeare to focus on the heroes and the moral environment of the Republic, especially to write Coriolanus, very nearly the first play ever written on the legendary Gnaeus Marcius. Coriolanus is, Spencer points out, the most authentic, least anachronistic, of the Roman plays, perhaps on the model of Sejanus—or perhaps because Shakespeare, aware of himself as an innovator, is on his mettle. Spencer's summary verdict on Romanitas in Shakespeare would have irritated Ben Jonson, but it is a fair one:

Setting aside poetical and theatrical considerations, and merely referring to the artist's ability to 'create a world' (as the saying is), we may ask if there was anything in prose or verse, in Elizabethan or Jacobean literature, which bears the same marks of careful and thoughtful consideration of the ancient world, a deliberate effort of a critical intelligence to give a consistent picture of it, as there is in Shakespeare's plays.

Before turning to the question, 'What was Rome to Shakespeare?' it is appropriate to consider Greece, a world that appears in the Shakespeare canon as often as Rome does. Though R. R. Bolgar echoed MacCallum in 1954 [in The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries] on the difference between Rome and Greece in Shakespeare, not all scholars are now so ready to dismiss Shakespeare's Hellenism as insignificant.

Shakespeare is at pains to bring 'weeds of Athens' into A Midsummer Night's Dream whether or not he had a real sense of what they looked like historically. In the same play and with the same dubious authenticity he introduces 'the ancient privilege of Athens' (l,i,41), a father's appalling authority over his daughter's freedom and even over her life. When we remember that the rigors of 'the sharp Athenian law' (1,i,162) are closely paralleled in the hyperbolic harshness of the Ephesian law under which Egeon is condemned to death in The Comedy of Errors, we may ask whether Shakespeare had a notion that ancient Greek culture was rigid and cruel. The irrational arbitrariness of Leontes in The Winter's Tale and the whimsical nature of Theseus's arbitration in The Two Noble Kinsmen (III, vi) come to mind as analogues. Of course there are other arbitrary laws in Shakespeare (one thinks of the capital penalty for fornication in Measure for Measure) which have nothing to do with Hellenic or Hellenistic culture, and some of Shakespeare's Greek justice derives from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, so one must tread tentatively; but it is possibly significant that Shakespeare, setting two of his early comedies in the Greek world, arranged them so that love, familial or romantic, triumphs over rigid traditionary law which is insisted on early in each play only to be flatly overruled later.

Such a view of rigorous but vulnerable law in the Greek world might have resulted from a mistaken impression of the large number of references in Acts and the Epistles to the brutality and legalism the Apostle Paul encountered in his travels through the Hellenistic world. Paul's encounters are almost all with Jews of the Diaspora, not with Greek civil authorities, who normally appear rather as indifferent than arbitrary. But the number of times Paul is physically threatened after having been accused of preaching doctrine counter to 'our law' in Greek synagogues might easily give a reader of Paul the image of embattled Greek-speaking Christians in a harsh and legalistic environment. The great theme of the Pauline Epistles is, of course, the triumph of love over rigid law, of a new dispensation over an older one. T. W. Baldwin showed in 1963 that the shipwreck and the geography in Errors owe something significant to the Acts of the Apostles, though Baldwin apparently missed the relevance of the Epistle to the Ephesians for the play [On the Compositional Genetics of The Comedy of Errors]. He also neglected the possible importance of Paul to Pericles, where, as in Errors, shipwreck and fracture of the family lead to eventual reunion in a religious hospice at Ephesus. It seems likely enough that a thoughtful study of the Pauline Epistles would show that Shakespeare's conception of the Mediterranean world comes in part from Scripture.

It is not cruelty or the preeminence of law over love but dissoluteness, deception, and perfidy that T. J. B. Spencer finds in the ancient Greeks as seen through Renaissance (and Shakespeare's) eyes. In an essay complementary to his earlier paper on 'the Elizabethan Romans', Spencer documents a pejorative view of the Greek national character in Roman literature, especially in the Aeneid and in stage comedy, whence it found its way easily to the Renaissance [' "Greeks" and "Merrygreeks": A Background to Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida ', Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, ed. Richard Hosley (1962)] There can be no doubt from Spencer's massed evidence that Greeks were pejorated in Shakespeare's time exactly as the French are in some English-speaking circles today. And there seems little room for disagreement when Spencer concludes that the right way to read Timon and Troilus is to strip away our inheritance of nineteenth-century philhellenism and recognize in them Shakespeare's participation in the traditional prejudice. Clifford Leech [in "Shakespeare's Greeks," Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, ed. B. W. Jackson (1964)] challenged Spencer by pointing out (quite rightly) that some Athenians are decent-minded in Timon and that some characters in Troilus, notably Cressida and Achilles, are, however tainted, more than satiric stereo-types, while Trojans share in the immorality ostensibly Greek; but there is no denying that both plays portray sullied Greeks and a corrupt Hellas. We must agree with Spencer that the two plays are best read as orthodox Renaissance portraits of the Greek world. There is certainly no need to see in them the evidence scholarship has so often strained to find: of Shakespearian world-weariness, or of a wholehearted commitment to medieval classicism (Troilus), or of malice toward George Chapman (Troilus), or even of rebellion against 'the schoolmasters' worship of antiquity', J. A. K. Thomson's interpretation, as Spencer quotes it.

Yet this view will not answer all our questions about Shakespeare's Greeks; convincingly as Spencer explains the moral tone of two plays, he must leave five more (The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen) and, as we wish, Venus and Adonis unaccounted for. Even when we have granted that these six works are less studiedly Greek in setting than Troilus and Timon, we must allow that there is more to Shakespeare's Greece than the Renaissance bias. James Emerson Phillips argued nearly forty years ago that Shakespeare's conception of ancient Greece was political, as his conceptions of ancient Rome and of medieval England were, even though politics is not the center of dramatic interest in any of the Greek and Roman plays. He prefigured Spencer's 'Elizabethan Romans' essay by applying Renaissance assumptions about monarchy and the state to Caesar, Antony, Coriolanus, Troilus, and Timon. It remained for Howard B. White to extend a political interpretation to Dream and Pericles (and to Cymbeline and The Tempest, also) and to argue that the political questions are 'Greek' in Shakespeare's Greek plays in something like the way they are English in the histories. So he sees Timon as portraying the decay of Athenian democracy and Dream as portraying the foundation of that democracy. (We might prefer to see the corruption of an entrenched oligarchy in Timon and a sketch for a philosopher-king in Dream, and then to add that The Winter's Tale offers a vivid portrait of a tyrant in action.) White's book is deeply flawed by mistaken interpretation and casual error, but it is sometimes attractively suggestive: on the psychology and ethics of ostracism in Cymbeline, for example, and (too briefly) on St Paul in Pericles.

A fuller, more tightly reasoned book remains to be written on Shakespeare's response to Greek political philosophy; such a book ought to stress his sense of the polis as the core of civilization. One sees it best in Timon, where the failure of the polis to manifest its ontological essence, the reciprocities of human intercourse, leads to an atavistic collapse into a barbarism conveyed by imagery of bestiality and cannibalism; only Alcibiades's eschatological purge of the city can restore the civility (both senses) of Athens. The best commentary on Timon's personal sins against reciprocity is The Odyssey with its insistence on hospitality as a reciprocal ethic and its portrayal of the Cyclopes in Book IX as archetypally pre-civilized, living each in isolation in his cave; the best commentary on the polis as a whole in Timon is the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle constantly emphasizes the centrality of reciprocity in civilized moral life. Knowing Shakespeare's intellectual habits, we might expect to find similar emphases in Coriolanus, written at about the same time as Timon and based on a source in Plutarch parallel to a major source of Timon; and it is there, the reciprocity emblematized in Menenius's fable of the organic body politic in I, i and pervading the play as one of its great moral issues. It will be necessary to return to Coriolanus and the ideal of the polis at the end of this essay.

The political ethic of reciprocity was available to Shakespeare in places other than Aristotle's Ethics; it was in fact so widespread in antiquity that there is not much point in trying to establish a locus classicus for Shakespeare's sense of the classical polity. He may have known Plato's Republic, but he would in any case learn something of the Greek ideal of the city state in Cicero and a great deal more, both about the ideal and about the imperfect reality, in Plutarch's Lives, especially in 'Pericles', 'Dion' (parallel to 'Marcus Brutus'), and 'Alcibiades', which contributed something more to Timon than the quarrel Alcibiades has with Athens. It has sometimes been said (by Bolgar, e.g., see above, p. 4, note I) that Plutarch taught Shakespeare little about Greece; it is time to qualify that judgment. Examination of the Greek lives in Plutarch which are parallel to Roman lives Shakespeare used shows that Shakespeare may have read more widely than his critics: Sidney Homan's article on 'Dion', 'Alexander' and 'Demetrius' is suggestive [Shakespeare Studies, VIII (1975)].

If Shakespeare's Greece offers us as yet only partially answered questions, his Rome does so no less. What, finally, was Rome to Shakespeare? Was it anything more than an analogue to medieval England, or Denmark, or Scotland, or any of the other worlds Shakespeare evoked? Twentieth-century scholarship has in two ways implicitly denied that it was anything more. First, the nearly universal failure to find a generic link among the Roman plays has implicitly suggested that they belong together less inherently than some other groups of plays in Shakespeare; it is still common to exclude Titus from the group, as MacCallum did. Second, scholarship has conventionally studied the classical tradition and then applied it broadcast across the Shakespeare canon, as if Shakespeare had not seen the ancient world in which he set one-third of his works as in any real sense a world apart. To illustrate this second implicit challenge to the identity of Shakespeare's Roman world, two instances can stand proxy for many others. In Hero and Saint, Reuben Brower 'explore[s] probable analogies between the Shakespearian heroic and the Graeco-Roman heroic'; the ancient heroic is to be found in a combination of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Plutarch—the analogues in Shakespeare are Othello, Hamlet, and Lear no less than Shakespeare's Greek and Roman heroes. In Milton Boone Kennedy's study of deliberative, forensic, and epideictic oratory in the Shakespeare canon [The Oration in Shakespeare (1942)] no distinction at all is made between plays in which the world of classical eloquence is actually portrayed and Shakespeare's other plays. No one will deny that a Brower or a Kennedy is entirely justified in seeing classical character or classical rhetoric in non-classical plays. But the effect of their method, a method applied almost universally by historical scholarship in this century, has been to encourage a fallacious inference about the ancient world in Shakespeare, Rome especially.

It can, on the contrary, be argued that Rome is a place apart to Shakespeare, a world whose mystique he attempts quite deliberately to depict. Such an argument appears in J. L. Simmons's Shakespeare's Pagan World: The Roman Tragedies. Simmons proposes that the distinguishing characteristic of Shakespeare's Rome is its secularity; the civitas Dei is not yet available as a transcendent absolute, and Shakespeare's Roman heroes grope in a relative world for a moral certainty that can never be accorded them in the same sense that such certainty is available to a protagonist in Christian drama. Perhaps because Augustine contrasted his heavenly city very directly and specifically with the temporal city, Roma, it seems not to have occurred to Simmons to ask whether his thesis might be applied to Shakespeare's Greek characters; they too, after all, operate sub specie temporis. Much greater limitations than the omission of Greeks from the pagan world are the casual dismissal of Titus as under the umbrella of the thesis but not worth discussing, the scanty treatment of Cymbeline, and the total neglect of Lucrece. What Simmons does do, however, is well done: his vantage offers a clear view of three Roman plays, individually and collectively.

A second major attempt to see Shakespeare's Rome as a world apart has recently been made in Paul A. Cantor's Shakespeare's Rome: Republic and Empire. Focusing closely on Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra, Cantor finds Shakespeare's portrayal of the Republic dominated by thumos (idealistic commitment, public spiritedness) while in Shakespeare's Empire eros (self-indulgence and the dissolution of moral boundaries) is in the ascendant. Freud would have labeled the polarity 'super ego' and 'id', though Cantor does not do so. Indeed, in a quite unfreudian way he implies repeatedly that thumos is preferable to eros and that it is somehow closer to the true spirit of Rome. Any view that Augustan opulence and hegemony are a casus from the virtues of the Republic runs across the grain of Virgil's insistence that those virtues survive in the Augustan world and that Romanitas in the Pax Augusta is the telos toward which all Roman history has tended. Yet Virgil does not appear in Cantor's index. There are other limitations: the lack of any coherent treatment of Caesar and the total neglect (as in Simmons) of Lucrece and Titus; the entirely mistaken argument that Rome needs a political leader in Coriolanus and that Caius Marcius could have been the man to lead. Yet there is much impressive criticism of both plays in this book. Two examples must suffice: Cantor demonstrates convincingly that the traditional opposition in criticism between Roman thumos and Egyptian eros is artificial, as self-indulgence dominates Roman politics and daily life in the play; he observes perceptively that the focus in Coriolanus is on the urbs while in Antony 'Rome' means something less defined, as the City diffuses into the Empire.

There are other ways in which Shakespeare might be seen to have defined Rome; the space that remains will be devoted to some of them. First is the likelihood that Shakespeare thought of Romanitas as eloquentia and that he made a deliberate effort to forge answerable styles for his Roman plays. Given Shakespeare's grammar-school education in rhetoric it is probable enough that he should have drawn the inference that Romanitas was a mode of utterance. I say here styles, not style, because the four Roman plays differ widely in style, a fact which may account for the neglect of this designation of Roman life in Shakespeare. Yet in all four plays style is prominent—and 'Roman', or so Shakespeare would have thought. Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra are both florid, though in quite different ways, Titus relying on copia as Ovid does to attain an aesthetic distance from the horrors it depicts, and Antony relying on the 'Brobdingnagian' language of all the characters to elevate the love affair and its tragic consequences to the status of 'high events' [quoted from S.L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Drama (1944)]. The self-conscious overstatement of the play may remind us of the stylistic self-indulgence of Empire writers like Lucan or Apuleius, though Antony never seems merely artificial. In Coriolanus hyperbole serves a more complex purpose, suggesting the protagonist's loss of control as well as his colossal stature: if rhetoric is the controlled language of civilized discourse in the urbs, the pre-civilized hero designates himself an outsider by this failure in him of urbanitas. He would rather pile up the bodies of his opponents like cordwood (I, i, 197-200) than negotiate with those opponents in rational argument.

The most striking of the Roman plays for its style is Julius Caesar, though criticism has never done it full justice. Samuel Johnson detected a Roman style, austere and unaffecting, in the play, and for nearly two centuries criticism echoed him by calling the play sparse; not until Wilson Knight's time was the play seen to have any texture to speak of. What is most 'Roman' about Caesar, however, is not its linguistic leanness, but its oratorical mode. Any number of commentators have observed that Plutarch offered Shakespeare the distinction between Antony's Asiatic oratorical style and Brutus's Laconic style but that Shakespeare had to devise the two orations himself with help perhaps from Appian. Few, however, have seen how much of the rest of Caesar is oratorical. From Marullus's twenty-four-line harangue of the Plebeians in I, i (a prefiguration of Brutus's oration in its merely temporary effectiveness) to Antony's brief laudatio funebris of Brutus in V, V, the play is filled with the solemnity and the intensity of public utterance. Indeed, it can be said with some justice that Portia delivers an oration to her husband in the orchard (while Lady Macbeth, by contrast, communicates with hers at a less formal level) and that the impact of IV, iii in Caesar is a result of the descent of Brutus and Cassius from the pedestal of formal discourse to the intimacies of bickering.

Another 'Roman' element of style in Julius Caesar is illeism, which Shakespeare would have found in Caesar's Commentaries and which he may have thought characteristically Roman—at least at the time he wrote Caesar. A great many characters in the play (not just Caesar, as is sometimes said) refer to themselves or others by name in the third person. Shakespeare made use of this device in Hamlet, which abounds in Roman allusions, and in Troilus, which like Hamlet was written shortly after Caesar, but after that it appears much less often; perhaps by the time he wrote Antony, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline he found illeism too artificial a rhetorical stance for drama, however classical it might sound. Such magniloquence is appropriate enough in Troilus, but in less satiric contexts it may jar—indeed critics who have caught Caesar and Othello employing the device have labeled both pompous.

The fact that illeism appears in Troilus after Shakespeare introduced it in Caesar makes it plain that he could readily transfer to a Greek setting something he thought of as characteristically Roman. Timon and Troilus both evoke as the Roman plays do the relation between personal decorum and verbal eloquence that Cicero and Quintilian thought of as the essence of civility and civilization. In Timon's curses the complete disjunction of eloquence from magnanimity is a living metaphor for the descent from civil conversation to barbarism in the play; when we hear magniloquence used as a clock for bad logic by both Greeks and Trojans in Troilus we may recall Socrates's belief that rhetoric and moral earnestness do not always keep company. T. McAlindon's often very astute book on Shakespeare and Decorum does not make these points; indeed, like Kennedy and Brower, he fails entirely to segregate Shakespeare's classical plays.

It was decorum in its technical sense that Samuel Johnson was referring to in his comments on the style of Julius Caesar, for he juxtaposed Roman style and 'Roman manners'. We may safely guess that he was alluding to the Stoic temperament that we see in several characters, in Cicero (I, iii), for example, and in Portia (II, i), and in Brutus (IV, iii). The contrast between this phlegmatic manner and Cassius's choleric energy and overtness is one of the effective dramatic devices in the play. There are other common traits of character in Julius Caesar that Shakespeare obviously thought distinctively Roman, notably anti-feminism (I, iii, 82-4; II, i, 119-22; II, i, 292-7 etc.); in Antony and Cleopatra, where a woman takes on the role of opponent and alternative to all that is Roman, such sentiments occur even more emphatically (cf. Canidius's embittered 'our leader's [led], / And we are women's men'—III vii, 69-70). In Coriolanus the contrast is not so much between man and woman as between man and boy, surely because Plutarch put so much emphasis in 'Coriolanus' on valor as the Roman measure of mature masculinity (we recall that for young Marcius the puberty rite was to flesh his sword against the Tarquins). There are still those who will argue that Volumnia is an Elizabethan huswife rather than a Roman matron, but most scholars no longer doubt that Shakespeare was consciously striving in all his Roman works for Roman character and style of life, however he may have succeeded.

Rome to Shakespeare was not just language and national character, but institutions also. T. J. B. Spencer once said of Titus that Shakespeare crowded the play with all the Roman political institutions he knew, regardless of their appropriateness to the historical setting in the late Empire. 'The Author seems anxious, not to get it all right, but to get it all in'.… The later Roman plays are much more careful to fit the politics to the time. There is more to Roman institutions than politics, of course; two stimulating articles in recent years have shown that Shakespeare was aware of the importance of family in Rome, even in his earliest Roman ventures. G. K. Hunter [in Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974)] in comparing Romeo and Titus in several ways has occasion to interpret the moral structure of Titus as in part familial: the ordered closeness of the Andronici is the measure in the play of Saturninus's amorphous family with its step-children, its adulterous foreign materfamilias, its illegitimate offspring, its Moorish intruder. A second essay is Coppélia Kahn's learned and intelligent analysis of the rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece in relation to Roman traditions of family honor and patrilineal succession as Shakespeare would have understood them [in Shakespeare Studies IX (1976)]. Lucrece kills herself not to protect her honor but to vindicate the honor of the Collatines: there must be no possibility of a genetic taint on the lineage of the dynastic family.

Rome, of course, is also a place to Shakespeare. It used to be said that he had little sense of Rome as a physical entity, that he dropped allusions to the Tiber and the Capitol into early scenes to suggest locus and let it go at that. Whatever the limitations of his detailed knowledge of buildings, Shakespeare thought of Rome in architectural terms: Menenius points out 'yond coign a' th' Capitol, yond cornerstone' when he wants a symbol of stead-fastness; the Triumvirate are 'pillar[s] of the world'; the Empire itself is a 'wide arch'. When the Tribunes and Plebeians shout 'What is the city but the people?', Cominius replies in a telling architectural metaphor; faction

 is the way to lay the city flat,
To bring the roof to the foundation,
And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges,
In heaps and piles of ruin.
                               (Cor.III, i, 203-6)

The city is also to Shakespeare a set of psychologically significant, virtually symbolic, loci often placed in contrast with one another—the Forum, the battlefield, the Senate house, the street, the domicile. Each is a manifestation of Romanitas, the domicile not less than public buildings, for it is in the Roman plays that Shakespeare most powerfully contrasts public and private life, portraying them sometimes as mutually inimical.

The most important edifice in Shakespeare's Rome, its wall, is seldom spoken of by scholars. To Shakespeare Rome is above all urbs in its etymological sense, the enclave of civilization ringed round with a protective wall, outside of which the dark forces of barbarism lurk. Coriolanus, a lonely dragon advancing on the gates of Rome or an eagle preying inside the walls of Corioles, is Shakespeare's most compelling embodiment of the terror that threatens the urbs from outside its wall; this 'Mycenean' hero, more at home in battle than in the polis, is reminiscent at Corioles of awesome Turnus in Book IX of the Aeneid, slaughtering inside the palisade like a wild beast. Walls, gates, and locks exist to keep the lust represented by a Tarquin outside, but tragically they cannot (Lucrece 302-43). The savage rape and mutilation of Lavinia in Titus takes place in the forest outside the wall of Rome; remembering the symbolic importance of Lavinia in the Aeneid we can readily think of Chiron and Demetrius as assaulting Romanitas itself.

The wall of Rome encloses a polis which in its political and social decorum embodies civilization; it is the ever-lasting wall that Virgil spoke of at the opening of his poem, but it is eminently fragile, as both Virgil and Shakespeare knew. Shakespeare's Romans, like the Trojans in Aeneid II, may breach their own wall to admit barbarism and death; the preying tigers (Titus III, i, 55) and the monstrous horse pregnant with death both enter from without. But there is worse; one may imitate barbarism by oneself negating the values of the polis; it is here that Rome is most vulnerable, as the actions of both Titus and Coriolanus make manifest. Shakespeare is obsessed enough with this horror to transfer it from Rome to Athens: 'The commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts' (Timon IV, iii, 347-8) no less than 'Rome is … a wilderness of tigers' (Titus III, i, 54).

When the full study we need of Shakespeare's Virgil is written, it ought to deal fully with Virgilian symbolism as it appears in the Roman plays: the walls of Rome are only part of the legacy. Virgil's vision of Rome as Fate's protégé, the source of the coherence of the Aeneid, survives muted in Shakespeare's vision of Roman history as teleological and inexorable, larger than any man who may oppose its momentum. It is this grand view of the history of Rome that Menenius Agrippa voices when he says in the first scene of Coriolanus:

   you may as well
Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them
Against the Roman state, whose course will on
The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs
Of more strong link asunder than can ever
Appear in your impediment.
                                     (11. 67-72)

He is addressing the riotous Plebeians, but his words apply as much to Coriolanus, who will atavistically seek to repeal the newly created institution of the tribuni plebis.

Virgil's mythic vision of Rome as driven (or called) by Fate toward the Pax Augusta was 'true' in his generation in just the same way the equally vulnerable Tudor myth was in Shakespeare's generation—that is, it was more true in its piety of invention than literalists are likely to understand. Who is to say that in basing his conception of Rome in five plays and a long poem upon Virgil's view of history Shakespeare was not portraying Romanitas authentically?