But Brutus Is An Honourable Man:
Mark Antony's Funeral Speech in Julius Caesar
Mark Antony's oration over Julius Caesar's body is a masterpiece of Shakespearean rhetoric.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” begins one of the most famous speeches in Shakespeare, in Act III, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar. Mark Antony’s funeral oration over Caesar’s body has given the English language some enduring phrases; “lend me your ears”, “The evil that men do lives after them”, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”, “But Brutus is an honourable man.” It is also a powerful piece of oratory, using both rhetorical patterns and emotive imagery to stir the crowd up against Caesar’s killers.
Antony begins this speech in an extremely weird situation – he has been asked to speak about his dead friend and comrade by Brutus, the man who planned and executed his murder. It is clear from the comments of the plebians that the mob’s sympathies lie with Brutus and the conspirators at the beginning of the speech: “T’were best he spoke no harm of Brutus here!/ This Caesar was a tyrant... We are blessed that Rome is rid of him.”
By the end of Antony’s speech, their views have completely altered: “Methinks there is much reason in his sayings./ If thou consider rightly of the matter/ Caesar has had great wrong.” Antony manages this by some clever oratorical tricks: at no point does he actually say that Brutus was wrong, in fact he continually repeats that “Brutus in an honourable man.”
Caesar was killed for being too ambitious, and Antony produces various pieces of evidence to refute this: that Caesar cried alongside the poor when they were in trouble, that he refused the crown when it was offered to him and that he brought captives home from the wars whose ransoms were paid to Rome’s treasury. However, at every stage he doesn’t denounce Brutus, but does the reverse, repeating that “Brutus said he was ambitious/ And Brutus is an honourable man.”
Antony sets up an obviously faulty syllogism or logical series: Caesar was not ambitious, Brutus says Caesar was ambitious, Brutus would not tell lies. Since these three statements cannot all be true the speech edges the crowd towards believing that the third statement (“Brutus would not tell lies”) is false.
He then directly opposes two statements: “I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke/ But here I am to speak what I do know.” Antony is getting closer to calling Brutus a liar; it is worth noting that he claims to “know” and “speak” are linked with Antony, where only “spoke” is linked to Brutus’ name. This implicitly associates Brutus with speech and outward show, rather than the certain internal integrity of knowledge.
He next moves from the subject of Brutus to the plebians themselves, reminding them that “You all did love him once, not without cause”, complimenting their past judgement and calling their current opinions into question. His apostrophe, or address to the abstract quality of judgement (“O, judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,/ And men have lost their reason.”) suggests that such inaccuracy in judging calls into question whether the crowd are even truly human. This conflates judgement in general with a specific example of bad judgement over Caesar’s character: Antony is raising the stakes by telling the plebians that one instance of faulty reasoning may have lost them their humanity. This obviously has an effect, since “reason” appears in the first comment by a plebian at the end of the speech: “Mehinks there is much reason in his sayings.” The speaker is eager to identify himself as one who can reason, and therefore agrees with Antony. Brutus and his conspirators are in trouble.
