The Day the Muses Eyed. (“...and they were singing: Bye, bye, men at Philippi...”)

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – clinical in presenting the art of persuasion – is renown for its straightforward, heavily monosyllabic rhetoric, and thus, the sublimity of the play is often overlooked. For example, this sublimity can be discerned in Shakespeare’s reference to the shocking cultural practice at the Lupercal race that opens the play. In preparation to begin the race, Marc Antony, standing nude before Caesar and Caesar’s wife, Calphurnia, is reminded by Caesar:

To touch Calphurnia, for our elders say,
The barren, touched in this holy chase,
Shake off their sterile curse. [I. ii. 7-9]

This early allusion to superstition is one of many references that thematically pit the role of uncontrollable fortune against the notion of willfully "fashioning" one’s fate. And much later, immediately after the conspirators have assassinated Caesar, Marc Antony (after fleeing home in the aftermath of the murder) sends a servant back to seek a promise of safe passage in order to conduct a conference with the perpetrators at the Capitol.
Brutus replies:

Tell him, so please him come unto this place,
He shall be satisfied; and, by my honour,
Depart untouch’d. [III. i. 140-142]

Thus, ironically, the superstitions of the elders alluded to by Caesar before the Lupercal race prove true: the rebirth of the republic that was to be precipitated by snuffing out Caesar turns out stillborn, all because Antony is "untouch’d." (Still more subtlety can be seen here in the earlier reference to the "holy chase" and the subsequent holey result, ("Witness the hole you made in Caesar’s heart" [IV. iii. 31], all occurring on a day that is arguably a holiday, that – to keep with parturition, too - should be a "labouring day." [I. i. 2, 4].)

Shakespeare carries this verbal sublimity to a philosophical domain by letting us peer into the workings of Brutus’ mind. Cassius, laying the seed of conspiracy, inquires:

CASSIUS: Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?
BRUTUS: No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself
But by reflection, by some other things. [I. ii. 50-52]

Thus, on the eve of the Ides of March we overhear an analysis of how one’s Self is eyed. The profundity of introspection is mocked by a Shakespearean pun:

BRUTUS: ....I turn trouble of my countenance
Merely upon myself. [I. ii. 37-38]

Shortly thereafter, Cassius responds:

CASSIUS: And it is much lamented, Brutus,
That you have no such mirrors as will turn
Your hidden worthiness into your eye,
That you might see your shadow. [I. ii. 56-58]

Cassius says even more here, too, than we might first observe: "eye" for "I" while "shadow" can signify an image casting a deepening immanence, or "actor," or "ghost" – all of which figures profoundly into the philosophical substance of the play. (For example, "shadow" signifying "ghost" in the line "That you might see your shadow" later manifests itself when Brutus does in fact see a ghost that identifies itself as "Thy evil side, Brutus" [IV. iii. 281].) Moreover, the whole notion of "shadow" as "actor" in the same line, "That you might see your shadow," is replayed in back-to-the-future format, as it were, in prophetic self-reflection as Cassius predicts that the present occurrences will be re-staged countless times in different tongues in centuries to come:

CASSIUS: ...How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn, and accents yet unknown! [III. i. 111-113]

Note, too, that in a play that plays on the concept of being "eyed," Shakespeare toys with whirling contrasts in perspective: e.g., Cassius here – along with the soothsayer – is able to "look" into the future, while Brutus is compelled to see the past, as the image of his murdered mentor, Caesar’s ghost, haunts him; elsewhere Flavius describes the need to clip Caesar’s metaphorical feathers to prevent a threatening bird’s-eye view over his minions, ("Who else would soar above the view/and keep us all in servile fearfulness" [I. i. 75-76]), while Brutus’ vantage – in the end – is driven lower than dirt: ("Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes:/Our enemies have beat us to the pit" [V. v. 21-22]). As another example, to underscore the vagaries of perspective, Shakespeare at the end of the play depicts Cassius standing at a foot of a hill and fatally relying on the eyes of Pindarus to assess the success of battle by relating the mistaken notion that their comrade Titinius is surrounded and taken. Cassius commits suicide before it is disclosed that Titinius was being congratulated by compatriots, rather than captured by enemy troops.

But it is with Brutus that the philosophical import of perspective becomes most pronounced, again linked inextricably to references to "eyes." Cassius lobbies Brutus by telling him:

CASSIUS: ...I have heard
Where many of the best respect in Rome
(Except immortal Caesar), speaking of Brutus,
And groaning underneath this age’s yoke,
Have wish’d the noble Brutus had his eyes. [I. ii. 57-61]

Here, "his eyes" does double duty, since the phrase could refer to Brutus’ eyes and a wish that he might cure himself from the blindness that does not permit him to "see" the threatening tyranny of Caesar. But "his eyes" here can also refer to Caesar’s eyes and a wish that Brutus assume the ruling mantle (and perspective) of Caesar. This allusion to transplantation of Caesar’s organs culminates in the symbolic melding of Caesar into Brutus, exemplified again when plebeians shout their early support for Brutus at the funeral of Caesar:

3 PLEBEIAN: Let him be Caesar.
4 PLEBEIAN: Caesar’s better parts
Shall be crown’d in Brutus. [III. ii. 51-52]

Little wonder, what with the predictable infusion of "Caesar’s better parts," that Brutus suffers from psychomachia – a battle within his soul. (This infusion is furthered by Plutarchean gossip – undoubtedly known by Shakespeare – that Brutus was the bastard son [and now the bloody heir] of Caesar.) Again it is the eyes that key the self-struggle of Brutus, since he declares in words that describe the source of not only Caesar’s ghost, but of his own bloated and vulnerable position as Caesar’s doppelganger:

BRUTUS: I think it is the weakness of mine eyes
That shapes this monstrous apparition. [IV. iii. 275-276]

The monstrous apparition of Brutus’ soul is thoroughly inspected through Brutus’ habitual self-doubting, a characteristic that endears him – as a kind of precursor to Hamlet – to modern audiences used to the notion that the concept of Certainty in matters of motives is always teetering on a sandy foundation. But we modern readers lose the sublimity of Shakespeare’s treatment of perspectives in this play when we buy into the begrudging declamation of Antony at the end of Julius Caesar:

ANTONY: This was the noblest Roman of them all. [V. v. 68]

We can discern from earlier passages that Antony, ever the slick rhetorician, merely seeks to sound the bell of high drama, rather than speak with sincerity. After all, he had previously declared Caesar the noblest in all of Rome, noting that the conspirators had shed "the most noble blood of all this world" [III. i. 156]. He addresses Caesar’s corpse by referring to it as "the ruins of the noblest man/That ever lived in the tide of times" [III. i. 256-257] Shakespeare gives a knowing nod to differing perspectives and the fickleness of the masses when they declare neither Caesar nor Brutus the noblest. Instead they declare that "There’s not a nobler man in Rome than Antony" [III. ii. 117].

And Shakespeare was probably ingeniously playing his inevitable word games again when he had Antony designate Brutus as the noblest Roman of them all. We must remember that earlier one of the plebeians, momentarily manipulated by the speech of Brutus, says of Caesar: "We are blest that Rome is rid of him" [III. ii. 71] Thus, given Antony’s suspect sincerity in anything, he may well have been saying – ever so subtly – that Brutus was the "no blest Roman of them all."