Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; From a rhythmic perspective,

the trochaic feel of this opening immediately commands attention. The succession of hard
stresses is also Shakespeare's way of using the verse to help Antony cut through the din of
the crowd. The two main methods Shakespeare uses to infuse Antony’s speech with
powerful persuasive energy are the way he writes the verse, and his command of rhetoric.

Antony is already in a very precarious position. His best friend Julius Caesar was
murdered by the senators of Rome. Antony wants vengeance, but he can’t do so by
himself. He’s also surrounded by a mob, and Brutus just got them on his side with a very
convincing speech. They already hate Antony and Caesar. His goal is to win them back.
Antony also echoes the opening line that Brutus uses ("Romans, countrymen, and lovers!"),
but conspicuously rearranges it; where Brutus begins with "Romans" to reflect his appeal
to their reason, Antony begins with "friends," which reflects the more emotional tact he
will take throughout the rest of his speech. Remember also that Antony has entered the
Forum with Caesar's body in tow and will use the corpse as a prop throughout his oration.
So the stakes are very high for Antony: If he succeeds, the crowd will avenge Caesar, and
Antony will take control of Rome. If he fails, he will be lynched by an angry mob.

Antony follows with a line of straight iambic pentameter punctuated with

a feminine ending. Here's the first irony of Antony's speech, in that he is unequivocally
here to praise Caesar. Antony is, in fact, lying. This is a calculated tactic to disarm a
crowd firmly on the side of Brutus when Antony takes the pulpit. The line ” The evil that
men do lives after them” is harder to scan than it might seem at first. The hardest word to
scan is lives; if you scan it as stressed, you have four consecutive stresses in a row. While
that isn't completely out of the realm of possibility, it's a bit of a stretch. Notice that the
words evil and men are in the stressed position. Antony might be making a subconscious
attempt to say Brutus and the other evil men who took the life of Caesar are living, when
they deserve to die but the real subject of Antony's rhetorical parallelism is good and evil,
not living and dying. If you notice in the text of the speech, Antony never overtly says:
“Brutus was a liar and a traitor, and Caesar must be avenged,” but that is exactly what he
gets the crowd to do. So how does he get them to do so, right after Brutus got them on his
side?

Building upon the previous thought, Antony continues eroding the base upon which
Brutus's argument is founded. This is masterful. All Antony has to do is introduce that four-
word qualifier, "if it were so," to form the crux of his argument to come. Grievous here
denotes "deserving of censure or punishment" in context, but sets up a play upon the word
in the line that follows. Antony might be making a subtle jab at the conspirators. Brutus
said Caesar was ambitious and Antony agrees that ambition is worthy of death, but he also
adds an If, to plant the seeds of doubt in the crowd’s minds. To drive it home, the word if is
in the stressed position, making it impossible for the crowd to not consider the possibility
that Caesar wasn’t ambitious, and thus, didn’t deserve to be murdered.
Aside from a trochaic inversion to begin this line, the meter is regularly iambic.
Antony, according to his agreement with Brutus, must acknowledge that he is speaking
by permission (under leave) of the conspirators. Brutus intends that this should show the
conspirators in a good light; unfortunately for Brutus and the rest, it gives Antony an
opening to elaborate upon them in what will evolve into a most unflattering refrain. And
here we have one of Shakespeare's most cited examples of verbal irony “For Brutus is an
honourable man”. The tone here is at its most subtle; Antony has to make this particular
occurrence as benign as possible at first. The irony as he returns to the phrase throughout
his speech is dependent upon a progressive contrast between Antony's words and his
inflection. We have a sense of disjointed meter that underscores the tension in what
Antony says. The line scans here as trochee/iamb/spondee/pyrrhic/iamb, which gives the
line a choppy rhythm. The repetition of "all" with the midline caesura gives the speaker a
naturally stressed inflection that betrays some of Antony's underlying scorn.

Antony returns to the actual predicate of his statementas he said the line “Come I
to speak in Caesar's funeral” with innocuous metrical regularity. The line is all but a
throwaway; Antony doesn't want the crowd dwelling on the idea that he is speaking here
by permission. The preceding parenthetical insertion of Brutus and the rest being
"honourable men" displaces his emphasis and lessens the impression that Brutus holds
sway over him. In doing so, Antony effectively obeys the letter of his agreement without
yielding to its spirit.

Metrically, Shakespeare employs a trochaic inversion centered upon a

midline caesura as antony said that “He was my friend, faithful and just to me”. Antony,
rather unsurprisingly, begins his formal eulogy of Caesar by recalling their friendship. On
the rhetorical level, this will also help call into question the reasoning that Brutus gives for
Caesar's murder. Antony contrasts his experience with what Brutus has said that Caesar
was ambitiuos. The obvious implication is that Brutus and Antony have different views of
Caesar. The more subtle implication is that since both men have claimed him as their friend,
they have equal authority to speak on the subject of Caesar's disposition. Antony, however,
has the advantage of not needing to justify his actions. Instead, Antony can focus on sawing
the limb out from under Brutus's argument.

“And Brutus is an honourable man” at this point, Antony is still ostensibly

speaking well of Brutus—at least to the crowd. A plebian might think that at worst,
perhaps, either Antony or Brutus has made an honest mistake in his judgment of Caesar.
On the other hand, the words says, ambitious, and honourable are becoming impossible
to miss.

The pronoun, given the preceding reference to Brutus, can sometimes be a tad
confusing at first. The "He" in the line “He hath brought many captives home to Rome”
refers to Caesar. The second foot of the line is the only tricky one to scan. An iamb seems
the best choice—scanning broughtas unstressed—given that Antony is emphasizing the
"many captives" Caesar brought, rather than stressing that he brought captives.

It's tempting to think that Shakespeare meant general in the line “Whose ransoms
did the general coffers fill” to be pronounced more like gen'ral to adhere more strictly
to iambic meter. As it stands, it's just as easy to read general as a dactyl substitution in a
predominantly iambic line. "General coffers" refers to the public treasury of Rome, and
Antony uses Brutus's logic about acting for the good of Rome to show that Caesar was also
acting for the good of Rome. Antony also displays the mark of a true politician: he appeals
to their wallets, reminding the crowd that what was good for the economy was good for
them.

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? The question, of course, is rhetorical. The
scary term for this style of rhetorical question is anacoenosis, a tactic of posing a rhetorical
question to one's audience for dramatic effect. The trope also implies a bond or common
interest between the speaker and the audience, that both are of like mind. By this technique,
Antony asserts that Caesar was not ambitious—and hence implies that Brutus was either
misguided or lying—while leading the citizens to conclude his assertion seemingly on their
own. Antony knows his audience well. Patricians and the upper crust of Roman society
that comprised the Senate were known to be indifferent, even callous, to the suffering of
the lower classes.

The final tally after 27 lines is seven instances of ambitious or ambition and five
instances of honourable. Antony has deflated ambition and transformed honourable from
a laud to an epithet. The final straw is the insertion of sure into the line. Nowhere does
Antony say anything that literally denigrates Brutus, but his subtextual meaning cannot be
more clear by this time. For all intents and purposes, Antony now puts his case to the crowd
as, "Who will you believe, Brutus or me?" This is the heart of Antony's approach: pathos,
or emotional appeal, versus the dry logos, or logical appeal, of Brutus. Antony understands
that between two men who claimed deep friendship with Caesar, the one who seems more
genuinely affected by his death generates more sympathy. Building upon that, Antony uses
his emotion to bolster both his credibility and his argument.

Satisfied that he has made his point about Caesar to the crowd, Antony now
appeals to their conscience as he said the line “What cause withholds you then, to mourn
for him?”. It was, after all, the commoners that celebrated Caesar's triumph over Pompey,
that cheered Caesar when he was presented a crown, that sought to make Caesar their king.
Antony reminds them that if they had cause to love him—and as he's refuted the rationale
behind Caesar's assassination—then they have every reason to lament his death.

The end of the line scans as iamb/spondee because of natural inflection as well as
the sense of what Antony is saying. Reason denotes "the ability to think rationally" in this
context. Antony's emoting is setting up for a dramatic pause to give both himself and the
crowd a brief respite.To Antony's credit, the sentiment is grounded in his love for Caesar;
it's also quite telling of the character that he's able to use this emotion in such a cynical
enterprise.

“And I must pause till it come back to me”, there is actually a rhetorical term for
this dramatic pause: aposiopesis (from Greek, literally meaning "becoming silent"). It
refers to a point where the speaker abruptly stops, and is most often employed to depict the
speaker as being overwhelmed by emotion. The last few lines are frequently cited as a
paragon of this figure of speech. Antony is taking a moment both to gauge his appeal to
the audience and to give them some time to let his words sink in. By the time he resumes
his speech, Antony is ready—and the crowd ripe—for the shift from persuasion to outright
manipulation.

The greatest gift Shakespeare ever gave his actors was to write his plays in blank
verse. It not only tells you which words are important to stress, it gives you clues about the
character’s emotional journey; just as a person’s heartbeat can indicate their changes in
mood, a subtle change in verse often betrays the character’s pulse and state of mind. Antony
uses his own emotions and his powers of persuasion to manipulate the crowd, so his verse
helps show how he changes the pulse of the Roman mob. One reason why this speech is so
famous is its clever use of rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking. Back in ancient Rome,
aristocrats like Antony were groomed since birth in the art of persuasive speech.
Shakespeare himself studied rhetoric at school, so he knew how to write powerful
persuasive speeches.

In conclusion, the reason this speech is famous is Shakespeare did an excellent job
of encapsulating the power of persuassive speech that the real Antony must have had, as
he in no small way used that power to spur the Roman crowd to mutiny and vengeance,
and began to turn his country from a dying republic into a mighty empire.