The Compassionate Stoic: Brutus as Accidental Hero

Abstract

In Julius Caesar, Brutus is a deeply attractive character, not only to his wife, Portia, and his friend, Cassius, but even to his murder victim, Caesar, as well as his chief rival, Antony. What makes Brutus so appealing, however, is a quality which he himself sees as a moral vice: compassion, including with it a sense of civic duty. Despite his initial misgivings, Brutus backslides into political engagement: Cassius lures him away from Senecan philosophical isolation back into an obsolescent Ciceronian enthusiasm for service to the state. His kind-heartedness is political, as well as ethical, finding expression in a sense of noblesse oblige. He tries to withdraw from public affairs, to “live unknown” like an Epicurean, but he has too keen a sense of his responsibilities or what Cicero might call his officia (‘roles, obligations’) as a husband, friend, and patriot; he cannot shake his old-fashioned pietas (‘duty, reverence’). Even more striking, perhaps, given his ostensible Stoicism, is Brutus’s tendency to give way to compassion, like a Christian. Pity is an emotion which he sees, like Seneca, as an embarrassing and distracting weakness. Nevertheless, his efforts to maintain a sense of command over his own inner life repeatedly break down. When he sees he has hurt his friend, Cassius, or his wife, Portia, he yields to a humane and generous desire to comfort them in their distress. This unbidden empathy, like his decision to engage in politics, is incompatible with his chosen “philosophy” (4.3.143). His own ideal self is not the one which Antony describes, the Republican hero, animated by concern for the “common good” (5.5.73), but instead, the quasi-mythical figure of the Stoic sapiens (‘wise man’): a hero of philosophical detachment. Effectively, Shakespeare depicts Brutus as torn between two opposed visions of heroism: Stoic and proto-Christian. He aims to become an exemplary Stoic sage. But he fails to remain indifferent to the imminent collapse of the Roman Republic. He cannot bring himself to alienate his own wife, Portia, or his friend, Cassius. In his concern for other people, Brutus reveals an aspect of his character which cannot be reconciled to his philosophical ambition: an intransigent streak of kindness. For Shakespeare, as well as his audience, shaped by the values of a Christian milieu, Brutus’s deep-set sense of empathy is attractive. It fits the Christian model of heroism: Christ’s self-sacrifice for love. For Brutus himself, however, acts of pity, including his own, are contemptible. His heroism, insofar as it is analogous to Christian heroism, is inadvertent, “accidental” (4.3.144), rather than deliberate, emerging despite his own best efforts. His reaction to his wife’s death, especially, stands out as a kind of felix culpa, redeeming him as a character from otherwise-insufferable Stoic posturing. For a Stoic, love such as Christ’s is not a form of heroism, but a dangerous weakness. As Francis Bacon explains, “He that hath wife and children, hath given hostages to fortune.” When Brutus grieves for his wife, it humanizes him in the eyes of the audience. To a Christian, tears can be noble; Christ himself weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. What Brutus wants, however, is to be instead what a Christian would call hard-hearted. As he himself sees it, his concern for others’ well-being is not virtuous, but instead, a damning lapse in his effort to maintain, at all times, at least an appearance of Stoic constancy. Christian caritas has no place in that vision of an ideal self, the remote, self-sufficient philosopher exalted in Senecan Neostoicism. There is no room there for political activism; not even for more discrete, personal acts of human fellow-feeling. Compassion by its very nature entails a loss of self-control; a surrender of the emotional autonomy which Seneca, especially, praises as the summum bonum.