us, were represented
respectively by Hemmings and Arnim.

The play opens with a street scene in Rome filled with working, rabble
citizens who have turned out to give Caesar a great triumph on his return
from successful war.

Flavius and Marullus, tribunes, enter and rebuke the people for greeting
Caesar.

Flavius twits the turncoat rabble in this style:

_"O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew ye not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed 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;
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made a universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds,
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way,
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?"_

Brutus and Cassius witness the triumphal march of Caesar with jealous,
vengeful and dagger hearts, and Cassius, the old, desperate soldier, first
hints at blood conspiracy.

Brutus asks:

"_What is it that you would impart to me?
If it be aught toward the general good,
Set honor in eye and death in the other,
And I will look on both indifferently."_

Fine talk! Brutus is not the only political murderer that talks of "honor"
through the centuries, a cloak for devils in human shape to work a personal
purpose and not "the general good."

Cassius delivers this eloquent indictment against Caesar, the grandest of
its kind in all history:

"_Well, Honor is the subject of my story--
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not to be, as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I, myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you.
We both have fed as well; and we can both
Endure the winter's cold as well as he.
For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me, 'Dar'st thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me, into this angry flood
And swim to yonder point?' Upon the word,
Accoutered as I was, I plunged in
And bade him follow; so, indeed, he did.
The torrent roared and we did