Why, saw you anything more wonderful?
(I. iii. 14.)
And after the enumeration of the portents, he critically replies:
Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time:
But men may construe things after their fashion,
Clean from the purpose of the things themselves.
(I. iii. 32.)
And then after a passing reference[184] to current affairs, he bids Casca good night. To him the moral of the whole tempest is: “This disturbed sky is not to walk in.” Opinions may differ as to this being the real Cicero; none will deny that it is a living type.
Apart from the main group of personages, more or less antagonistic to Caesar, stands the brilliant figure of his friend and avenger, the eloquent Mark Antony. Shakespeare conceives him as a man of genius and feeling but not of principle, resourceful and daring, ambitious of honour and power, but unscrupulous in his methods and a voluptuary in his life. Caesar tells him that he is “fond of plays” and “revels long o’ nights.” Cassius calls him a “masker and a reveller.” Brutus says that he is given “to sports, to wildness and much company.”
He makes his first appearance as the tool of Caesar. With Asiatic flattery, as though in the eastern formula, to hear were to obey, he tells his master: