"I believe that each generation should have a chance to see a giant figure of the past from the perspective of its own time and circumstances." --- Anthony Everitt: Author of Cicero

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"Many people in the Renaissance were passionately interested in the story of Caesar's death at the hands of his friends and fellow politicians. There was much debate about who were the villains and who were the heroes. According to the fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante, Brutus and Cassius the foremost of the conspirators who killed Caesar, were traitors who deserved an eternity in hell. [He put them in his lowest level in the Inferno, with Judas Iscariot]--g. But in the view of Shakespeare's contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, Caesar was a rebel threatening Rome and Brutus the wisest of senators.

Shakespeare's dramatization of Caesar's assassination and its aftermath has kept his death alive among generations of readers and play goers. Is Brutus the true hero of this tragedy in his principled opposition to Caesar's ambition to become kind of Rome? Or is Caesar the tragic hero, the greatest military and civil leader of his era, struck down by lesser men misled by jealousy and false idealism. By continuing to address these questions, our civilization engages not only in the enjoyment of a great play but also in an examination of the ways it chooses to govern itself." --- Folger Edition of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare