And bears with glasses, elephants with holes,
Lions with toils and men with flatterers;
But when I tell him, he hates flatterers,
He says he does, being then most flattered.
Assassination is a less piteous thing than to see the giant intellect by its very strength unable to contend against the low cunning of a fifth-rate intriguer.
Such, then, appears to be Shakespeare's conception of Julius Cæsar. He is the consummate type of the practical: emphatically the public man, complete in all the greatness that belongs to action. On the other hand, the knowledge of self produced by self-contemplation is wanting, and so when he comes to consider the relation of his individual self to the state he vacillates with the vacillation of a strong man moving amongst men of whose greater intellectual subtlety he is dimly conscious: no unnatural conception for a Cæsar who has been founding empires abroad while his fellows have been sharpening their wits in the party contests of a decaying state.
Cassius: his whole character developed and subjected to a master-passion that is disinterested.
The remaining members of the group are Cassius and Antony. In Cassius thought and action have been equally developed, and he has the qualities belonging to both the outer and the inner life. But the side which in Brutus barely preponderated, absolutely tyrannises in Cassius; his public life has given him a grand passion to which the whole of his nature becomes subservient. Inheriting a 'rash humour' from his mother, he was specially prepared for impatience of political anomalies; iv. iii. 120.republican independence has become to him an ideal dearer than life.
i. ii. 95.
I had as lief not be as live to be