Ethos Pathos Logos In Julius Caesar

Tayler Breer
Graham
2nd Block
17 October 2014
Julius Caesar Essay The Tragedy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is a historic tragedy about the brutal murder of the Roman senator, Julius Caesar. Within the play, Caesar has two close friends—Brutus and Antony. Antony is a loyal friend, supporting Caesar and encouraging him in his climb to kingship; Brutus is a king-fearing traitor who leads the plot to murder Caesar. After Caesar is murdered, both friends make speeches—Brutus to justify his actions and Antony to passive-aggressively disprove his claims. In the speeches, they use three rhetorical literary devices: ethos, the appeal to gain the crowd’s trust; pathos, stirring the crowd’s emotions to influence behavior; and logos, the use of logic to reason with the crowd. By comparing the use of ethos, pathos, and logos in each speech and by

However, Antony’s small amount of logos is just as strong, if not stronger than Brutus’s excessive amount. While in the first of calming the crowd, Brutus inquires, “Would you rather Caesar live and die all slaves, / than that Caesar were dead and die all free men?” (JC 3.2.23-24). This is a botched logic; he does not ever present actual evidence of this tyrannical behavior in Caesar or his actions. However, in the minds of the king-fearing Romans, the words, flimsy though they are, are enough. In disproving Brutus’s claims that Caesar was ambitious, Antony uses many examples to prove the opposite. The following brings the welfare of the people into it, showing that with Caesar alive they were given much: “He hath brought many captives home to Rome, / whose ransoms did the general coffers fill; / did this in Caesar seem ambitious?” (JC 3.2.89-91). Antony provides solid evidence and a sound argument to explain that Caesar’s seemingly ambitious actions were rather to help the people of Rome, which is not ambitious in the