ABSTRACT
It is a critical commonplace that Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare’s “Roman” works, a rubric also applied to Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, Titus Andronicus, and The Rape of Lucrece. Apart from setting, however, scholars diverge widely on what, if anything, unites these works, or even on what Rome is intended to represent. For Vivian Thomas, for instance, the works demonstrate Shakespeare’s espousal of such Roman values as constancy and valor; for Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s concern with human behavior within political structures; for J. L. Simmons, a Christian awareness of the limitations of pagan Rome; and for John Alvis, the tragic costs of living for self-glory. 1 I wish to propose another way of viewing these works, namely, that if they are considered in historical rather than compositional sequence, they collectively detail a constitutional decline closely resembling that defined in Plato’s Republic. 2
