countrymen,
What need we any spur but our own cause
To prick us to redress? what other bond
Than secret Romans, that have spoke the word, 125
And will not palter? and what other oath
Than honesty to honesty engag'd,
That this shall be, or we will fall for it?
Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous,
Old feeble carrions and such suffering souls 130
That welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear
Such creatures as men doubt; but do not stain
The even virtue of our enterprise,
Nor th' insuppressive mettle of our spirits,
To think that or our cause or our performance 135
Did need an oath; when every drop of blood
That every Roman bears, and nobly bears,
Is guilty of a several bastardy,
If he do break the smallest particle
Of any promise that hath pass'd from him. 140

CASSIUS. But what of Cicero? shall we sound him?
I think he will stand very strong with us.

[Note 114: /No, not an oath./ This is based on Plutarch's
statement in _Marcus Brutus:_ "Furthermore, the only name and
great calling of Brutus did bring on the most of them to give
consent to this conspiracy: who having never taken oaths
together, nor taken or given any caution or assurance, nor
binding themselves one to another by any religious oaths, they
all kept the matter so secret to themselves, and could so
cunningly handle it, that notwithstanding the gods did reveal
it by manifest signs and tokens from above, and by predictions
of sacrifices, yet all this would not be believed."--/if not
the face of men./ This means, probably, the shame and
self-reproach with which Romans must now look each other in
the face under the consciousness of having fallen away from
the republican spirit of their forefathers. The change in the
construction of the sentence gives it a more colloquial cast,
without causing any real obscurity. Modern editors have
offered strange substitutes for 'face' here,--'faith,'
'faiths,' 'fate,' 'fears,' 'yoke,' etc.]

[Note 115: /sufferance:/ suffering. So in _Measure for
Measure_, III, i, 80; _Coriolanus_, I, i, 22. In I, iii, 84,
'sufferance' is used in its ordinary modern sense.--/the
time's abuse:/ the miserable condition of things in the
present. Such 'time's abuse' in his own day Shakespeare
describes in detail in _Sonnets_, LXVI.]

[Note 118-119: Brutus seems to have in mind the capriciousness
of a high-looking and h