Were Cassius And Brutus Justified in Killing Caesar

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Cassius and Brutus, two partners in crime, literally. They were successful in killing Julius Caesar, however, were they justified? In the eyes of many, they were not, yet, their reasoning was substantial. The reason Cassius and Brutus were justified in the killing of Julius Caesar is the fact that they did to benefit the Roman Republic. It may not make sense at first, but think about it. They did it for the better of the people. They saw it as not harming the people but helping them.
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In Act I, Scene II, Cassius mentions the stories of him and Caesar.When he says, “and this man is now become a god, and Cassius is a wretched creature, and must bend his body if Caesar carelessly but nod on him,” this shows Cassius’s jealousy towards Caesar, which is confusing when trying to answer this question. You have to separately look at each individual as to what their exact reasoning is. First come Brutus.

He states on page six of Act 1, Scene II that he fears “the people choose Caesar for their king. ” This statement alone proves the fact that he is looking out for the good of the people. Once you go deeper into the story, you see how he turns down the advice of Cassius numerous amounts of time.
This shows you that Brutus is more of a level headed man. He takes every single thing into consideration before making a definite decision about something. When it comes to the decision of killing Julius Caesar, Cassius suggests to Brutus that they also kill Marcus Antonius; Brutus shuts down his idea immediately.
His reason for this being that it would simply be too much to kill both him and Julius Caesar. Now when Brutus is asked his reasoning for killing Caesar, he uses the “for good of Rome. ” He also mentions that if Caesar were to be elected as king, he would abuse his power.
Throughout the play, you can see Brutus change; however, the play draws away from this by pulling towards their secondary actors, being the triumvirs. Brutus may have had a level head throughout the planning and executing of the murder, but he lost it in the end. The fact that he killed himself showed that he could not handle his decision. Even though he may have contradicted himself towards the end, his reasoning still stood towards the bettering of the lives of Romans. Now we look towards the reasoning of Cassius’s participation in the murder of Julius Caesar.
Some say that his participation was out of spite and jealousy to be Caesar; others say it was to, again, better the Roman republic. In this case, the account of Cassius’s participation was due to the constant reminder that Julius Caesar had, and was, everything he wanted to be. In other words, Cassius wanted to murder Julius Caesar out of the mere concept of revenge. As an example, in Act I, Scene II, Cassius uses flattery in efforts to get Brutus to lend his ears to him. His yearning for attention throughout the whole entire play is quite noticeable.
He looks towards Brutus and others, not in admiration but in hopes that someone will look upon his ideas and actually take them into consideration. When he begins to mention the story of him and Caesar swimming in the river, you can almost taste the jealousy in your mouth as you read the words off of the paper. He says the words with so much spite and hatred towards Caesar that it almost has the presence of foreshadowing. You can tell that by the way he converses about Caesar there is bound to be a conflict of some sort between the two, the conflict turning out to be the public murder of Caesar.
Once Cassius is introduces the concept of murdering Caesar to the other conspirators, he gets them to fully consume the idea. He does this with a colossal number of techniques. Finally, after he gets them to accept the idea, he pushes to murder those closest Caesar. He mentions that the conspirators should also kill Marcus Antonius. Not only does he not think this through, but he gets carried away.
Brutus has to announce to the others and Cassius that if they murder Marcus Antonius along with Julius Caesar, ot only will it cause mass suspicion amongst the Roman citizens, but it will also cause immense publicity that directly points towards to the conspirators being the type of murderers without liable defense. Cassius has no direct or specific reasoning towards committing the murder of Julius Caesar. Although, to contradict this statement, Cassius did piggy-back the reasoning of Brutus, he too, also wanted to help the Roman republic. With the closing statements present in the previous paragraph, the answer to the question, “Were Cassius and Brutus justified in the killing of Julius Caesar,” simply stands within your own opinion.
In this case, the answer for the question depends on who exactly you are speaking of. If you are to ask if Brutus was justified, then you have the reasoning that he wanted to better the Roman republic. If you were to ask if Cassius was justified in the killing of Julius Caesar, you could say yes or no. If you are to say yes, you would have to take into consideration the possibility that he may have committed or participated in the murder out of spite and revenge before coming to the conclusion that he too, wanted to better the Roman republic.
If you were to say no, you have option of reverting to the simple fact that he did not have a valid reason to partake in the killing. Cassius, however, did stick to the concept of killing Caesar to benefit the citizens of the Roman government only in efforts to keep Brutus on board with the idea and overall, total concept. Therefore, Cassius and Brutus were justified in the killing of Julius Caesar because they both partook in the concept of standing up and making government rule better for the civilians within the Roman republic.

Bradford Harrison

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