Much of Shakespeare's audience most likely had a pretty decent handle on Roman history--the decline and fall of both the republic and the empire. But let's say the play Julius Caesar is one's first lesson in Roman history. If this is the case, then, once again, a tip of the hat needs to go to the way Shakespeare crafts his plays. In the roles of Flavius and Marullus, he creates two brief candles who strut and fret their, in this case, minutes upon the stage and then are heard no more. But the tale they tell is extremely important.
Once again, the beginning of a Shakespeare play provides a glimpse into the future. In this case, the future is not just the end of the play, but real historical circumstances. In Marullus' famous harangue to the throng, he calls the people of Rome out on their fickleness and reckless thinking:
Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome,
To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome....
Render unto Pompey? But how quickly and easily the plebeians of Rome shift their loyalty! This will happen two more times in the play, after the two funeral orations. And since the play's the thing that holds the mirror up to nature, then what we are witnessing here in this shiftiness and inconstancy of thought and values is the first pressure change, so to speak, in 500 years worth of tides in the affairs of the Roman Empire....
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