Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), 1599
★ 3.72 from 227.3k ratings on Goodreads
Power, friendship, and the arguments clever men use to justify what they want: Shakespeare's Rome is a room full of people talking themselves into disaster. The play moves through crowded, argumentative scenes, its voice quick with wit and high rhetoric, and a growing sense of dread.
Feels like dread and awe. About ambition and power.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy political arguments, Roman history, and watching capable people talk themselves toward ruin. The 16th-century language and long rhetorical speeches can be demanding, so it suits readers ready to slow down for verse.
Why read it
It gives you a close look at how ambition and persuasion work in a crisis, in language that still cuts.
Pages from the book
A man refuses to blame the stars for his own smallness.
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonourable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates:The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,But in ourselves, that we are underlings. Why the fear of dying costs more than dying does.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;The valiant never taste of death but once.Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,It seems to me most strange that men should fear;Seeing that death, a necessary end,Will come when it will come. The calm farewell of two men who suspect there won't be another.
No, Cassius, no: think not, thou noble Roman,That ever Brutus will go bound to Rome;He bears too great a mind. But this same dayMust end that work the ides of March begun;And whether we shall meet again I know not.Therefore our everlasting farewell take:Forever, and forever, farewell, Cassius!If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;If not, why then, this parting was well made. William Shakespeare.Shakespeare never saw Rome; he took the play's history from Plutarch's Lives in Thomas North's 1579 translation, sometimes turning North's prose into verse almost word for word.
Books that feel like this
More by William Shakespeare
Hamlet
William Shakespeare, 1603
A prince in mourning delays, dissembles, and thinks too much, while a court watches every move. Read for the language, stay for the recognitions.
Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare, 1597
Two teenagers from feuding families fall in love over three days, and the adults around them keep choosing sides.
Macbeth
William Shakespeare, 1606
A soldier is greeted by three strangers who promise him a crown, and we watch, line by line, how quickly a decent man can argue himself into murder.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Julius Caesar for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy political arguments, Roman history, and watching capable people talk themselves toward ruin. The 16th-century language and long rhetorical speeches can be demanding, so it suits readers ready to slow down for verse.
- What is Julius Caesar like?
- The play moves through crowded, argumentative scenes, its voice quick with wit and high rhetoric, and a growing sense of dread. Feels like dread and awe. About ambition and power.
- What should I read after Julius Caesar?
- If you liked Julius Caesar, try Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) and Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (E. Nesbit).
A taste of the feed
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
What stays unforgiven when a crime becomes the price of peace?
My lot be still to lead The life of innocence and fly Irreverence in word or deed, To follow still those laws ordained on high Whose birthplace is the bright ethereal sky. No mortal birth they own, Olympus their progenitor alone: Ne’er shall they slumber in oblivion cold, The god in them is strong and grows not old.
Oedipus Rex · Sophocles
What lovers say when they are trying to invent the sweetest words.
She was frightened at first, but when she saw that it was Romeo himself, and no stranger, she too was glad, and, he standing in the garden below and she leaning from the window, they spoke long together, each one trying to find the sweetest words in the world, to make that pleasant talk that lovers use. And the tale of all they said, and the sweet music their voices made together, is all set down in a golden book, where you children may read it for yourselves some day.
Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare · E. Nesbit
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