ABSTRACT
The time is a little before three in the morning on the Ides of March. While Cassius is making sure of Brutus’s involvement in the assassination of Julius Caesar, three of the conspirators who have accompanied him to Brutus’s house are arguing about the position of sunrise:
A later scene in Julius Caesar also takes place a little before the traditionally ominous third hour, but this time on an autumn afternoon and historically two and a half years after the death of Caesar. Titinius and Messala are hurrying across the battleground to bring good news to Cassius:
The subtle assonance between these two passages is a small though distinctive part of what Emrys Jones has called the ‘structural rhyming’ of Julius
Caesar.1 The March dawn in Rome is the dayspring of republican hopes; the fading October day at Philippi marks their final defeat. Casca’s assertive tones in the brief argument of 2.1 are words as gesture, and pass easily into the flourishes with which his sword cuts the air: first a little to his right, then a little to his left, lastly straight ahead in the direction of the Capitol where, a few hours hence, he will plunge it into Caesar’s neck. The three bold movements combine the preliminary actions of a swordsman before a duel with the ritual gestures of a priest wielding the sacrificial knife. In contrast to this expectancy of voice and gesture, the long vowels and weighty monosyllables of Titinius’s lament have a solemn finality that makes us feel the tide in men’s affairs has exhausted itself on a rocky shore. At the end of the earlier passage, Brutus advances into the group of conspirators, and his hands and theirs are clasped in a complicity that will turn to deadly action when Casca strikes in earnest: ‘Speak hands, for me’ (3.1.76). On the battlefield, Titinius’s cry ‘Oh my heart!’ sets the tone for the passage quoted and for the play’s remaining scenes, dominated as they are by an impassioned fidelity which was thought literally to have its seat in the heart, and which finds its most eloquent expression in the Liebestod of Cassius and Titinius.
