It is not surprising that the leading men of Rome want to kill Caesar. It seemed pretty obvious to Plutarch at least: ‘For, men striving who should most honour him, they made him hateful and troublesome to themselves that most favoured him, by reason of the unmeasurable greatness and honours which they gave him’, he wrote (JC 155). If we want to discover whether Shakespeare was in agreement with Plutarch, let us pause to consider the actions that lead to that moment when Caesar leaves the safety of his home for the Capitol. The difference between women and men, the supreme difference, as inheritors of the Roman tradition may still like to think of it, might turn out to be less cardinal than the differences, the constant competitive thrusting, that continually arises between men. Now that we've seen both murderer and victim, Brutus and Caesar, as vulnerable and as husbands, we may be better placed to understand the process that will put them at different ends of the knife. The tensions between them, which arise because they are both powerful educated men, are alone responsible for this polarization, for the Roman crowd sees plenty to love in each of them. Like his close friend, Caesar, Brutus ‘sits high in all the people's hearts’ (1.3.157).

At the opening of the play, the crowd seemed full of intelligence, full of high spirits and good will. It is only later, in the wake of the violent acts of their so-called superiors, the conspirators, that they too break out into violence themselves, destroying property, interrogating and then killing the poet Cinna. It is as if violence, a violence implicit in the suppression of their language, were an infection that the tribunes had passed on to them. And of course, they were only doing the kind of thing that Roman armies were supposed to do, strictly outside Rome. But the crowd never lose their enthusiasm for Caesar, the pleasure they take in him as a man, that brings them bounding onto the stage as the first scene opens. These people are looking for someone they can respect, someone whom they can also recognize as like themselves; that is why they are ready to put up a statue of Brutus so soon after he has helped to kill Caesar (3.2.42).