The ambition for more power for a corrupt leader is similar to the reaction of an addict to drugs and expecting him to stop their wrong doing. Multiple cases throughout history have shown great leaders and horrible leaders and many of them started with a sort of vaulting ambition. Even as far back as Julius Caesar we have seen examples of this since he expanded Rome to the superpower it was until his death in 44 B.C.. Even more recently we have examples like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Bennito Mussolini where they used authoritarian powers to try and hold complete power. Some of these leaders had no conscience and could not understand or feel guilt, while some could this made them eventually go crazy when they realized what had happened. …show more content…
Throughout the play Macbeth has the vaulting ambition to gain power and to gain it through any means necessary. Macbeth first got the ambition to become king when he heard the prophecy told by the witches. This ambition was then used when he was king to hold his power as securely as he could by having Banquo killed. “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus”(Shakespeare III.i 49-50). The quote shows how Macbeth is using the ambition he has to keep his power by having others murdered and spied upon for his own good. In history we have seen many cases where ambition blinds the person or completely takes the person over and causes them to commit heinous acts or lose responsibility. Julius Caesar is one of the first to come to mind when thinking of ambitious leaders because he had created one of the largest and longest lasting empires in history. He later had rebellions on his hands while was out trying to conquer other lands. This later caused many of the people he was close to in politics to become more popular and they had eventually turned on him leading to his death by conspirators. “An important feature of the plan was to win people over with promises of more extensive debt reform, and so to undermine Caesar's popularity”(Welch). This was Caelius’ attempt at trying to undermine Ceasar and this meant that his popularity was on the decline where others see his office as theirs now. Caesar’s quest for expansion had left many people in question and they looked at other leaders in Rome to see who would be their next Consul. Not as similar to Caesar, but Macbeth had lost popularity from when he went from Thane of Glamis and Cawdor to being the king of Scotland. When he became king he focused on making sure his office was secure and not how the people of his country felt, and it did not help when he had spies and murderers sent to anyone he