Having seen off Spain, it had the potential to become the greatest empire in the modern world. And so to the classic conservative move: look to the past in order to understand the present. The greatest empire in history was that of the ancient Romans. But Rome hadn’t been built in a day. It had only achieved its power by building a mighty army and developing military technology of unprecedented sophistication. Above all, it needed a military genius, an all-conquering general who could hold whole continents in the palm of his hand. His name, of course, was Julius Caesar.

The leading exponent of this position was the Earl of Essex. He sponsored the authorship of historical works and translations of classical texts that supported his ideals of Roman virtue and fortitude. He offered himself to Queen Elizabeth as a modern Julius Caesar. In March 1599 he set off for Ireland at the head of a mighty army. In the autumn he skulked back to the queen’s court in London, having ignominiously failed to defeat the Irish rebels. Superior firepower could not deal with the guerrilla tactics of the insurgents. Shakespeare’s play was written in the fearful interim between the first motion against the insurrection and the realization of the hideous dream of failure.

Essex’s image of himself as Julius Caesar went to his head. His Rubicon moment came eighteen months later when, “assisted by sundry Noblemen and Gentlemen” (Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, among them), he marched against the queen herself, vainly imagining that the people of London would flood into the streets and offer him the crown. He was executed for his pains.

Shakespeare had a very different take on his material from that of Essex. He was fascinated by the assassination of Julius Caesar and its aftermath because this was the period in Roman history that asked the most fundamental questions about politics: does authority belong to the people, to an individual ruler, or to an abstraction called the “state”? What is the most effective form of government—a monarchy, an empire, an oligarchy, a republic?

At the beginning of the play, the long-established Roman republic, with its system of checks and balances (senators representing the patricians and tribunes the plebeians), is in crisis. If Caesar is not stopped, democracy will be destroyed. But are the men who try to stop him acting out of duty to the state or personal ambition? And what happens once the knife has gone in? Chaos, civil war, and then the events of the play’s sequel, Antony and Cleopatra, in which there is a failed attempt to divide rule between three men and then the rise to power of a new Caesar, Octavius, who would later be called Augustus, the inaugurator of the imperial phase of Roman history.

Despite the fact that he was writing under Elizabeth, a queen-emperor who saw herself as another Augustus, and despite the apparent approval of Essex’s Irish expedition that he worked into the prologue of Henry V at exactly the time he was writing Julius Caesar, Shakespeare seems to have been genuinely skeptical about the imperial project associated with the name of Caesar. At the same time, he was horrified by the idea of mob rule, as witness the scene when Cinna the poet is lynched because he happens to share a name with one of the conspirators.

THE ROMAN PHILOSOPHY

The character who invites particular sympathy is Brutus, guardian of republican values, as he wrestles with the question of whether to be or not to be a conspirator. Cassius espouses the philosophy of Epicurus, who believed that the gods do not intervene in human affairs: what will be will be, and so there is no need to pay attention to omens and auguries. From this philosophy it is only a short step to that of Machiavelli—might is right and there is no such thing as a moral order. Brutus, by contrast, is portrayed as a Stoic, a philosophy associated with the idea of duty and the cultivation of mental fortitude as a shield against the vicissitudes of fortune. In each case, though, experience proves the philosophy insufficient. When news comes that Portia is dead, Brutus is “sick of many griefs.” Cassius replies, “Of your philosophy you make no use, / If you give place to accidental evils.” It is much harder in practice than in theory to rise above the accidents and chances that life throws at us.

Stoicism generally argued that adversity should be faced, not escaped, and that suicide was therefore not the answer. That is why Brutus considers that the austere moralist Cato let the side down when he killed himself: “Even by the rule of that philosophy / By which I did blame Cato for the death / Which he did give himself.” But the proposition is soon belied by the unfolding action. Unable to bear the thought of the shame of being led through Rome a prisoner, Brutus takes himself the way of Cato.

Cassius is also forced into the discovery that philosophical theories have a way of being belied by events. When foreboding ravens, crows, and kites hover in place of mighty eagles over his army, he interprets the change as a divine sign and is therefore forced to modify his Epicurean belief that the gods do not speak to mortals: “You know that I held Epicurus strong / And his opinion: now I change my mind / And partly credit things that do presage.” “Partly credit” is good: he has not entirely renounced the Epicurean skepticism about omens and auguries.

One of the most significant manifestations of the Roman influence on sixteenth-century ideas was the philosophy known as neo-Stoicism: as Cicero and Seneca had wrestled with the role of the intellectual in an age of instability or tyranny, so thinkers in the age of Shakespeare sought to reconcile the Stoic idea of indifference to fortune with the Christian conception of divine providence. For a self-consciously intellectual dramatist such as Fulke Greville, friend of Sir Philip Sidney and lord over Stratford-upon-Avon, neo-Stoicism was the foundation for both a theory of drama and a political position. Shakespeare wasn’t like that; he was too nimble on his feet and wary of his back to sign up to any philosophical or political code. But the fact that his plays are the exact opposite of propaganda does not mean that they lack philosophy or politics: Julius Caesar spoke to the turmoil of AD 1599 just as much as to that of 44 BC.

A clock strikes, men wear doublets rather than togas, night-watchmen patrol, and there are references to handkerchiefs: such purposeful anachronisms reveal that Shakespeare was a “modern-dress” dramatist, making the past speak to the present.