Betrayal as a theme: from Dante’s frozen lake to Antony’s “unkindest cut”

Why this murder became the model

The death of Caesar, and above all the part Brutus played in it, became a standard example of betrayal. This reading traces how that happened in three stages: how the ancient writers framed the murder, how Dante judged it, and how Shakespeare dramatised it. It also sets out the opposite view, because the case for Brutus as a patriot is as old as the case against him.

The reason starts in the sources themselves. They do not describe enemies killing an enemy. They describe men who had been spared, promoted and trusted by Caesar, killing him at a meeting they had urged him to attend.

How Rome framed it

Cassius Dio is explicit about the favours. He says Cassius had been spared by Caesar and given a praetorship, and that Trebonius and Decimus Brutus joined the plot notwithstanding that they also had received many benefits at his hands. Plutarch tells how Caesar pardoned Marcus Brutus after Pharsalus and then advanced him. The theme of the kindness repaid with murder was put to the Roman crowd at the funeral itself. Suetonius records that, to stir pity and anger, the games included a line from the Contest for the Arms of Pacuvius:

The same framing appears in the official response. Suetonius says the Ides of March were named the Day of Parricide, a word for the killing of a father, and that a column in the Forum was inscribed To the Father of his Country. Calling the murder parricide turned a political act into a crime against the closest of bonds.

The ancient writers also tell the sequel as a kind of reckoning. Suetonius says that Hardly any of his assassins survived him for more than three years. Plutarch goes further and describes Caesar’s guardian spirit, which followed upon him even after death as an avenger of his murder, hunting down everyone who had taken part. These are moral shapes laid over history, and the writers present them as such, but they help explain why the story was remembered as a betrayal and its punishment rather than as a political killing.

Dante: the bottom of hell

The most severe judgment on Brutus in literature is Dante’s. In the Inferno, the ninth and last circle of hell is a frozen lake, Cocytus, reserved for traitors. The canto headings of the Longfellow translation on Project Gutenberg divide it into four zones by the kind of trust betrayed: Caina, Traitors to their Kindred; Antenora, Traitors to their Country; Ptolomaea, Traitors to their Friends; and Judecca, Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors.

At the centre of Judecca is Lucifer himself, with three faces, each mouth chewing a sinner, and with the beating of his wings freezing the lake: Thereby Cocytus wholly was congealed. Virgil, the guide Dante calls the Master, names the three. The one in the front mouth, suffering most, is Judas Iscariot; the other two are Romans:

So Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the deepest zone of all, beside Judas Iscariot, as traitors to a lord and benefactor. In Dante’s scheme the murder of Caesar is not a political act to be argued either way: by putting its leaders beside Judas, he ranks it with the worst betrayal his poem knows. The Folger’s editors put Dante’s view in one phrase: Brutus and Cassius, for him, were traitors who deserved an eternity in hell.

One detail in the passage is worth noticing alongside the ancient accounts. Dante’s Brutus speaks no word, just as Suetonius’ Caesar died uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke. Whether or not Dante had that passage in mind, which this guide cannot say, the silence now belongs to the betrayer.

Dante’s other Caesar and other Brutus

Dante’s judgment is sharper because of where he puts the others. In Canto IV, in the first circle, which the Longfellow headings call Limbo, among the virtuous pagans, Dante sees Caesar in armour with gerfalcon eyes; and, a few lines later, that Brutus who drove Tarquin forth: the ancestor who expelled the kings and, in the verse Suetonius quotes, became the first consul. The same family name appears at the top and the bottom of hell. The Brutus who freed Rome from a king is honoured; the Brutus who killed a man accused of wanting to be king is damned.

Shakespeare: ingratitude and irony

Shakespeare’s play puts the word for this betrayal into Mark Antony’s mouth. Holding up Caesar’s bloodied mantle at the funeral, Antony points to the cut made by Brutus and explains why it was worse than the others:

The word Antony chooses for what killed Caesar is not the blade but Ingratitude, more strong than traitors’ arms,. That is the Roman framing from Suetonius’ funeral line, given new force. It is also the meaning the stage gives to “Et tu, Brute?”: the shock is not that Caesar is attacked, but that the attacker is someone he loved.

Antony’s other weapon is irony. Through the speech he keeps repeating For Brutus is an honourable man,, until the crowd hears the opposite of what the words say. Antony never names Brutus a traitor outright; he lets the audience reach the word itself.

Brutus’ own last lines in the play turn the betrayal inward. Running on his sword, he says Caesar, now be still: I kill’d not thee with half so good a will. The man who struck Caesar dies more willingly than he killed, and the play lets him admit it.

The other view: Brutus the patriot

Not everyone agreed with Dante. The Folger editors note that Shakespeare’s contemporary Sir Philip Sidney saw Caesar as a rebel threatening Rome, and held that Brutus was the wisest of senators. The ancient sources already contain this view. Plutarch opens his Life of Brutus by saying that even those who hated him on account of his conspiracy against Caesar ascribed whatever was noble in the undertaking to Brutus, and he records Antony’s verdict that Brutus alone acted from what seemed to him the nobility of the deed. Shakespeare ends his play with that verdict.

Seen this way, Brutus did not betray a friend for gain. He chose the republic over a friend, at great cost to himself. Shakespeare’s Brutus says as much to the crowd: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. The play gives both cases full voice, which is why, in the Folger editors’ words, it has kept this debate alive.

What makes it a betrayal

Put the sources together and three elements recur in every telling that treats the murder as betrayal. The first is trust: Caesar dismissed warnings, went to the meeting at a friend’s urging, and, in Plutarch, called Brutus his natural successor. The second is benefit: the killers included men Caesar had pardoned and promoted, a point Dio, Plutarch and the funeral line all press. The third is closeness: the stories of Servilia, the word teknon and Antony’s “Caesar’s angel” all bring the killer inside Caesar’s affections.

“Et tu, Brute?” holds all three in three words. It is addressed to one man, it assumes he should have been on Caesar’s side, and it asks only whether he, too, has turned. That compression, more than any certainty about what was said in the hall, is why the line became the shortest possible way of naming a betrayal.

That is the last reading. The side-by-side table puts every account in one place.