Summary: Act V, scene iv
Brutus prepares for another battle with the Romans. In
the field, Lucillius pretends that he is Brutus, and the Romans
capture him. Antony’s men bring him before Antony, who recognizes
Lucillius. Antony orders his men to go see if the real Brutus is
alive or dead and to treat their prisoner well.
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Act V, scene iv →
Summary: Act V, scene v
Brutus sits with his few remaining men. He asks them to
hold his sword so that he may run against it and kill himself. The
Ghost of Caesar has appeared to him on the battlefield, he says,
and he believes that the time has come for him to die. His men urge
him to flee; he demurs, telling them to begin the retreat, and that
he will catch up later. He then asks one of his men to stay behind
and hold the sword so that he may yet die honorably. Impaling himself
on the sword, Brutus declares that in killing himself he acts on
motives twice as pure as those with which he killed Caesar, and
that Caesar should consider himself avenged: “Caesar, now be still.
/ I killed not thee with half so good a will” (V.v.50–51).
Antony enters with Octavius, Messala, Lucillius, and the
rest of their army. Finding Brutus’s body, Lucillius says that he
is glad that his master was not captured alive. Octavius decides
to take Brutus’s men into his own service. Antony speaks over the
body, stating that Brutus was the noblest Roman of all: while the
other conspirators acted out of envy of Caesar’s power, Brutus acted
for what he believed was the common good. Brutus was a worthy citizen,
a rare example of a real man. Octavius adds that they should bury
him in the most honorable way and orders the body to be taken to
his tent. The men depart to celebrate their victory.
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Act V, scene v →
Analysis: Act V, scenes iv–v
Brutus preserves his noble bravery to the end: unlike
the cowardly Cassius, who has his slave stab him while he, Cassius,
covers his face, Brutus decides calmly on his death and impales
himself on his own sword. Upon giving up the ghost, Brutus, like
Cassius, addresses Caesar in an acknowledgment that Caesar has been avenged;
whereas Cassius closes with a factual remark about Caesar’s murder
(“Even with the sword that killed thee” [V.iii.45]),
Brutus closes with an emotional expression that reveals how his inextinguishable
inner conflict has continued to plague him: “I killed not thee with
half so good a will” (V.v.51). Additionally, whereas
the dead Cassius is immediately abandoned by a lowly slave, the
dead Brutus is almost immediately celebrated by his enemy as the
noblest of Romans. Notably, Brutus is also the only character in
the play to interpret correctly the signs auguring his death. When
the Ghost of Caesar appears to him on the battlefield, he unflinchingly
accepts his defeat and the inevitability of his death.
With Antony’s speech over Brutus’s body, it finally becomes
clear who the true hero—albeit a tragic hero—of the play is. Although Caesar
gives the play its name, he has few lines and dies early in the third
act. While Octavius has proven himself the leader of the future,
he has not yet demonstrated his full glory. History tells us that
Antony will soon be ousted from the triumvirate by Octavius’s growing
power. Over the course of the play, Cassius rises to some power,
but since he lacks integrity, he is little more than a petty schemer.
The idealistic, tormented Brutus, struggling between his love for
Caesar and his belief in the ideal of a republic, faces the most difficult
of decisions—a decision in which the most is at stake—and he chooses
wrongly. As Antony observes, Brutus’s decision to enter into the
conspiracy does not originate in ambition but rather in his inflexible
belief in what the Roman government should be. His ideal proves
too rigid in the political world of the play, in which it appears
that one succeeds only through chameleonlike adaptability, through
bargaining and compromise—skills that Antony masterfully displays.
Brutus’s mistake lies in his attempt to impose his private
sense of honor on the whole Roman state. In the end, killing Caesar
does not stop the Roman republic from becoming a dictatorship, for Octavius
assumes power and becomes a new Caesar. Brutus’s beliefs may be
a holdover from earlier ideas of statesmanship. Unable to shift
into the new world order, Brutus misunderstands Caesar’s intentions
and mistakes the greedy ambition of the conspirators for genuine
civic concern. Thus, Brutus kills his friend and later dies himself.
But in the end, Antony, the master rhetorician, with no trace of
the sarcasm that suffuses his earlier speech about Brutus, still
honors him as the best Roman of them all.
