Brutus As A Tragic Hero In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Every tragedy must have a tragic hero and in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar our hero is Brutus. Brutus is a very complex man with many character traits conflicting with each other. Some of his good qualities are that he is very patriotic, honorable, good leader, respectful and truthful. His flaws however that bring him to his doom outways his good traits. Some of these traits are poor judgment, not practical, and naive. Both his good qualities and his flaws caused him to make an error in his judgment causing his own death and downfall in the play. Brutus makes a decision to listen to the conspirators and compose a plan to kill Caesar. The composition of the plan and the exposition both tested his good and bad traits as a person. Honor. Brutus was a very honorable citizen of Rome and would do anything for this country even kill one of his close friends. The conspirators had been aware of this and took advantage of it so Brutus would be on

If Brutus didn’t decide to listen to Cassius when he was telling him that Caesar needed to die then none of this would have happened. That was his first case of bad judgment. After Brutus decided to listen to Cassius, they later killed Caesar, this leading to his second occurrence with bad judgment. His poor judgment was taken advantage of by Mark Antony. This mistake was letting Antony convince him that he should speak and Caesar’s burial and he wouldn’t say anything unacceptable about the conspirators. Brutus underestimated how close Antony and Caesar was. When the conspirators proposed the idea of killing Antony with Caesar, Brutus quickly shut it down saying “for Antony is just but a limb of Caesar”. Brutus expected that once Caesar was killed that Antony would take his own life because he is “nothing” without Caesar. Letting Antony speak at Caesar’s funeral was a tremendous mistake, which caused all the civilians to revolt against the