Thirty

“And so Flavius walks with Marullus through the streets of Rome. Are they equals? Nominally, it could be said that they are: two tribunes, two followers of Pompey, two opponents of Julius Caesar. Yet a chasm yawns between them. Where Marullus is impulsive and lacking in tact, constrained in his understanding, Flavius is shrewd and efficient. Less charismatic, perhaps, but more managerial. They walk, as we were saying, through the streets of Rome. They come upon a mob of citizens celebrating the Caesar’s return. They admonish the crowd, reproach them for their enthusiasm: ‘Wherefore rejoice?’ Marullus asks these ordinary Romans. Then he accuses them of being traitors, or, more precisely, turncoats: ‘Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft have you climbed up to wall and battlements, to towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops, your infants in your arms, and there have sat the livelong day, with patient expectation, to see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.’ Marullus says this while Flavius keeps quiet. And this matters because a kind of moral double-dealing reigns over this section and its forms. Here Marullus recognises that the questionable thing is not citizens going out into the streets to celebrate the triumph of Rome’s leader on a labouring day and without the signs of their profession. The problem is that they are doing all of this for Julius. When they did it for Pompey it was perfectly acceptable, a deserved veneration. You must remember, young actor, that between Plutarch and Shakespeare, history had already ensured that Pompey was placed on the pedestal of beautiful forms. Pompey, the Apollonian; Julius, the Dionysian. Pompey, the man of prudence; Julius, the man of excess. Or, as Marullus tells those Caesar-loving citizens regarding Pompey: ‘And when you saw his chariot but appear, have you not made a universal shout, that Tiber trembled underneath her banks to hear the replication of your sounds made in her concave shores?’ Marullus gets choked up when he remembers those bygone days. Maybe Flavius would not have got so emotional. But his companion is made of more combustible stuff. Marullus launches his final attack against the mob: ‘And do you now strew flowers in his way that comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood? Be gone! Run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude.’

“And having come to this point, and before the whole play turns into too much of a bore, Flavius has to intervene, add a dash of reason to the whole. He interrupts Marullus and, being more of a mending type himself, he tells the citizens: ‘Go, go, good countrymen.’ He’s a wily one, that Flavius. Marullus, a maniac, calls them ingrates and traitors and sinners. But Flavius calls them ‘good countrymen’ and gets them on his side: they share this country, and they are equal in the eyes of Rome. But his cunning does not stop there. Immediately he tells them something else: ‘For this fault assemble all the poor men of your sort; draw them to the Tiber banks, and weep your tears into the channel, till the lowest stream do kiss the most exalted shores of all.’ In one fell swoop, the ‘countrymen’ become ‘poor men’, persons classified by their ‘sort’. But that’s a minor detail. The central thing in Flavius’ speech is that he summons the plebs, the same people who cheered for Caesar seconds earlier, to disseminate the interests of the Senate. He wins them over to his cause and puts them on the campaign trail.”