SOURCE: Kaufmann, R. J., and Clifford J. Ronan. “Shakespeare's Julius Caesar: An Apollonian and Comparative Reading.” Comparative Drama 4, no. 1 (spring 1970): 18-51.

In the following excerpt, Kaufmann and Ronan discuss Julius Caesar as a sustained study of the limits and tragic potentiality of Stoic constancy.

My enemies are those who want to destroy without creating their own selves. 

Nietzsche

A man's virility lies more in what he keeps to himself than in what he says. 

Camus

All crimes, so far as guilt is concerned, are completed even before the accomplishment of the deed. 

Seneca

I

Peter S. Anderson's brilliant essay in a recent issue of this journal advanced discussion of Julius Caesar to a new level of methodological sophistication.¹ His working out, through intelligent deployment of structuralist techniques, of a “metonymic epistemology of sacrifice” must be studied in toto and attentively to appreciate its rich critical dividends. The essay...