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First performed in 1599, Julius Caesar may have been written for the opening of the new Globe Theatre, taking place that year (Shakespeare, 1599/2000). Shakespeare's primary source was Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. The play centers on the events of March 15, 44 BCE, when Caesar was killed in the Senate House by a group of conspirators who believed that Caesar had grown, or would inevitably become, tyrannical. This murder occurs roughly in the middle of the play, with rising discord among the conspirators until the pivotal event, followed by confused, polarized, and destructive reactions to his death. As French philosopher and literary critic René Girard said, “The real battle is a battle for the interpretation of Caesar's murder” (Girard, 1990/1991, p. 413). Such a battle is reflected in the scholarly and philosophical efforts to cast the figure of Caesar and his murderers within a discernible moralistic or metaphysical framework. In his reflection on the play, Harold Bloom drew from Freud's Totem and Taboo , commenting on how easy it was to kill Caesar, an indication that he, as primordial father, needed to be sacrificed by the filial horde (Bloom, 1998, pp. 105, 108). In Book XV of his Metamorphoses, Ovid (8 AD/2010) elevates the soul of Caesar into a star (lines 1059-1067). Dante Alighieri (1320/1983), who approved of Caesar as founder of the Empire, famously placed Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell, in the section for those who were “Treacherous to Their Masters”; along with Judas Iscariot, they are each in one of Satan's three mouths, being torn apart for eternity (canto 34). Thomas Aquinas seemed to have a conflicting view about Caesar, characterizing him in his 1270 work De Regimine Principum as a virtuous and merciful
Emperor, yet also as a tyrannical usurper deserving of his death (Schanzer, 1963, p. 16).
Organizing one's thinking about the event proves difficult, as contrasting pressures em