ABSTRACT
After discussing Plato, Cicero, biographers of Julius Caesar and others regarding classical and Renaissance notions of tyranny, this chapter focuses on close readings of parts of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, looking at the relations among tyranny, freedom, republic, empire, the people, rhetoric and poetics. The role of freedom and tyranny was a central debate for Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, the humanists as well as for Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The strife in Rome did not begin with the death of Caesar and does not end with the death of Brutus. Whether a republic or not, Rome is unsettled.
