Ethos Pathos Logos In Julius Caesar

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“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” Antony tells the people of Rome during his passionate funeral speech. After Brutus and his conspirators assassinate Caesar, Brutus gives a speech saying his actions were just. Antony is not a proponent of Brutus’s actions and therefore tells the people why what Brutus did was immoral. Both men give meaningful and long speeches, and although Brutus is sincere in his defense, Antony uses more emotional, logical, and ethical appeal to the people, making his speech stronger. Although Brutus uses logos in his argument, he weakens its meaning but creating it a fallacy. The fallacy he uses is false dichotomy, asking the crowd if the “Had rather Caesar was living and die all as slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all freemen?” This creates a problem for the reader because it states that there are only two options: Either Brutus kills Caesar and the people are free or Caesar remains in power and the people’s freedom is gone. This, of course, is not true, for there are always several options to a situation. …show more content…

Brutus pairs the words describing Caesar’s accomplishments with those describing his own reactions. For example, he says that “As Caesar loved me, I weep for him,” “…was valiant, I honor him,” and “…was ambitious, I slew him,” which provides examples of his usage of pathos, ethos, and logos, respectively. Brutus continuously tells the crowd that he loves Caesar, but loves Rome more, and this is his main argument supporting the assassination. He also wants to enforce his belief that he and the conspirators killed him because they believed his ambition would lead to danger. Because he mainly relied on the use of logic throughout his speech, Brutus’s appeal to the public is not very