When someone truly understands rhetoric and how to use it to their advantage, they can do amazing things with it. In The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Marc Antony used his skills in the art of rhetoric to completely alter the mindset of an entire crowd. People who had been tricked into thinking they were being led by good people were moved to anger and hatred of those same rulers by Antony, using nothing but his words. Antony knew he needed to get the crowd to hate the conspirators, because they had killed a good friend of his. He slowly coaxed the crowd away from their own thoughts towards the new rulers and made them think like he did by using the skills of pathos (emotion), logos (logic), and ethos (appearance.) Antony starts off his speech …show more content…
His use of pathos is a vital part to his plan in this final part of his speech, and he uses the crowd’s love of Caesar and one final trick up his sleeve to finish it. He reveals a will that Caesar left to the people, but despite telling them how it would affect them so deeply, does not say what he left for them yet. Instead, he tells the crowd that it would not be proper for them to know how much Caesar truly loved them because it would only make them angry and sad. Before revealing the will, Antony shows the crowd Caesar’s toga, pointing out each hole where a dagger had pierced it and telling them who had made each hole. He uses adjectives for each conspirator when telling the crowd, and when he gets to Brutus’ stab he tells of how the “blood of Caesar followed it” as if rushing out to see if it was really Brutus who had done such a thing. He tells of how dearly Caesar had loved Brutus, and how the betrayal was so horrible to Caesar that it was what truly killed him. This sad story moves the crowd back towards their love of Caesar, and angers them to the point of wanting to burn the conspirators. After telling the story of how Caesar was murdered by the conspirators, Antony makes one final play to anger the crowd even more. He reveals what was in the will he had told the crowd about before, in