Passion Vs. Reason In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Passion vs. Reason Politics , both a political art and science, as absurd as it may seem. Politics involves the art of rhetoric and the science of the human mind, emotion, and motivation. Successful politicians are the cleverest, most rhetorically astute. The one 's who can exercise their political propaganda most strategically to manipulate the opinion of the majority. Play write, William Shakespeare, recognized this fact when he wrote his famous and tragic play Julius Caesar. He revealed in his play that Roman politicians ' rhetoric played a critical role in their political propaganda 's influence on the people. Two Roman politicians in his play, Brutus and Antony, keenly utilized rhetorical devices to convince the Roman people of which side to support after Caesar 's assassination. Both talented of politicians, but Antony appeals to the vast majority. This essay will address objectives of Brutus and Antony 's speeches at Caesar 's funeral, the rhetorical devices they employed, a comparison of appeal to passion versus reason, and concluding with the play 's lesson on political propaganda. The head assassin Brutus presented his speech before the people in the funeral scene to emphasize the honor of …show more content…
He accomplishes this with one rhetorical device called litotes, which denies a point in order to affirm it. (Leithart 98) Antony 's speech is full of litotes, "I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke." (3.2.103) In this case, Antony proclaims that he does not wish to refute Brutus, but in reality that 's exactly what he means to accomplish. Antony exercises irony also, continually reiterating that Brutus and the conspirators are honorable men who acted nobly by killing Caesar. By the end of his speech, the ironical nature of this point became apparent to the Roman people. (Leithart