You are dull, Casca, and those sparks of life That should be in a Roman you do want, Or else you use not. You look pale and gaze And put on fear and cast yourself in wonder, To see the strange impatience of the heavens: But if you would consider the true cause Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts, Why birds and beasts from quality and kind, Why old men fool and children calculate, Why all these things change from their ordinance Their natures and preformed faculties To monstrous quality⁠—why, you shall find That heaven hath infused them with these spirits, To make them instruments of fear and warning Unto some monstrous state. Now could I, Casca, name to thee a man Most like this dreadful night, That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars As doth the lion in the Capitol, A man no mightier than thyself or me In personal action, yet prodigious grown And fearful, as these strange eruptions are.

That done, repair to Pompey’s theatre. Exit Cinna . Come, Casca, you and I will yet ere day See Brutus at his house: three parts of him Is ours already, and the man entire Upon the next encounter yields him ours.

Him and his worth and our great need of him You have right well conceited. Let us go, For it is after midnight; and ere day We will awake him and be sure of him. Exeunt.

Get me a taper in my study, Lucius: When it is lighted, come and call me here.

It must be by his death: and for my part, I know no personal cause to spurn at him, But for the general. He would be crown’d: How that might change his nature, there’s the question. It is the bright day that brings forth the adder; And that craves wary walking. Crown him?⁠—that;⁠— And then, I grant, we put a sting in him, That at his will he may do danger with. The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins Remorse from power: and, to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway’d More than his reason. But ’tis a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder, Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; But when he once attains the upmost round, He then unto the ladder turns his back, Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees By which he did ascend. So Caesar may. Then, lest he may, prevent. And, since the quarrel Will bear no colour for the thing he is, Fashion it thus; that what he is, augmented, Would run to these and these extremities: And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg Which, hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous, And kill him in the shell.

Is guilty of a several bastardy, If he do break the smallest particle Of any promise that hath pass’d from him.

The taper burneth in your closet, sir. Searching the window for a flint, I found This paper, thus seal’d up; and, I am sure, It did not lie there when I went to bed. Gives him the letter.

Get you to bed again; it is not day. Is not to-morrow, boy, the ides of March?

’Tis good. Go to the gate; somebody knocks. Exit Lucius . Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar, I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

Sir, ’tis your brother Cassius at the door, Who doth desire to see you.