SOURCE: Vawter, Marvin L. “Julius Caesar: Rupture in the Bond.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 72, no. 3 (July 1973): 311-28.

In the following essay, Vawter contends that Julius Caesar should be understood as a critique not just of Caesar's tyrannical ambition or the malicious intent of the conspirators, but as a wholesale condemnation of the corrupted Roman nobility for its destruction of natural, communal bonds.

Among the many questions raised in Julius Caesar, one of the most important is Cassius' rhetorical question to Brutus amidst his vehement characterization of Caesar:

Now in the names of all the gods at once, Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great? 

(I.ii.146-48)

Cassius does not require an answer, for it is his way of conveying the enormity of Caesar's tyranny. In metaphors of physical size, he describes for Brutus and for us a beast...