Mark Anthony opens his famous, but fictional, eulogy to Julius Caesar with 7 words of endearment and authority; Aristotelian pathos and ethos, that have become as familiar as blue sky to fans of Shakespeare and English lit students everywhere: “Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears”.

Julius Caesar, a tragedy by Shakespeare, written around 1599, was based on Caesar’s life and death as documented in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

With pathos, logos and a chariot laden with irony, Anthony turns initial honor for Brutus and Caesar’s ambition inside out. He brings honor to Caesar and lays ambition on Brutus, along with Cassius. He brings condemnation to the conspirators and love for Caesar.

The first few lines of Anthony’s Eulogy:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honourable men–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?
O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Source: “Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare, Act 3, Scene II. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Graphic: Marlon Brando as Mark Antony in the 1953 film “Julius Caesar”