Read the extract from 'Julius Caesar' Act 3, Scene 2, given below and answer the questions that follow: Antony: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious; If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest– For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men– Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.
List the three arguments that Antony uses immediately after he speaks these lines to prove conclusively that Julius Caesar was not ambitious.
Topic: Act 3 Scene 2 — proving Caesar not ambitious
Answer
(1) Caesar filled the public treasury with the ransoms of the captives he brought home — an ambitious man would have kept the wealth for himself. (2) Caesar wept whenever the poor cried to him: "When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept." Ambition is made of sterner stuff. (3) Caesar refused the crown three times at the Lupercal, before the whole crowd — the plainest possible proof, since an ambitious man seizes a crown when offered.
Give the three in the order Antony uses them; the marks are one each and the sequence shows how he builds. Notice the technique worth mentioning in a stronger answer: each argument is offered as evidence the crowd itself witnessed, and each is followed by the refrain "Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; / And Brutus is an honourable man" — so the proof and the mockery advance together.