Examining Octavius Virtue In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

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This praising of Octavius's virtues by Shakespeare transforms Octavius from a leader and an Emperor into a God-like figure who deserves to be the ruler of the world. Shakespeare in his praising and glorifying of the Romans, particularly Octavius Caesar, he ignores, dehumanizes and marginalizes the Egyptians who are either silenced, so we do not hear a voice of an Egyptian who objects or tries to refuse Caesar's orders, or when an Egyptian tries to represent any feeling toward Rome or the Romans we feel the glorification of the Romans in his speech. Charmian, one of Cleopatra's maids, when she is asked about Julius Caesar, as a Roman, to be compared with Antony, she replies:
Charmian. O that brave Caesar!
Cleopatra. Be choked with such another …show more content…

In Renaissance age the Roman Empire and the Romans represent the ancestors of the English monarchy, King James I adopted the image of the Romans in his reign and he called himself Augustus. In the time of James I, Rome was idealized and represented a prototype of England, Stephen Greenblatt in his editorial volume The Norton Anthology: English Literature remarks that James was fascinated with the idea of the Romans and of being an emperor: "James liked to imagine himself as a modern version of the wise, peace-loving Roman Augustus Caesar, who autocratically governed a vast empire" (1235). Whereas the ideology of Restoration age was different from the previous age in which the writers of Restoration-era avoid glorifying Augustus and they accused him of tyranny, and at the same time they hoped to have a Caesar but without his tyrannical ambition. Greenblatt claims that: " after 1700 most writers stressed that Augustus had been a tyrant who thought himself greater than the law. But in 1660 there was hope that Charles would be a better Augustus, bringing England the civilized virtues of an Augustan age without its vices"