SOURCE: “‘With Himself at War’: Shakespeare's Roman Hero and the Republican Tradition,” in Shakespeare's Political Pageant: Essays in Literature and Politics, edited by Joseph Alulis and Vickie Sullivan, Rowman & Littlefield, 1996, pp. 237-61.

In the following essay, Bathory examines the relationship between self-knowledge and politics in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, and elucidates the affinity between Brutus's self-delusion and the collapse of the Roman Republic.

“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

—William Butler Yeats

Shakespeare's challenge to Roman republicanism suggests that the political virtue upon which Rome rested was well suited to Rome's imperial foreign policy but was less well suited to its domestic politics. Honor not justice provides the political foundation of the Roman Republic. The Roman tradition had led time and again to the forging of internal peace in time of domestic crisis by going to war with...