Brutus in Literature and Art
Lucius Junius Brutus is quite prominent in English literature, and he was quite popular among British and American Whigs.
A reference to L. J. Brutus is in the following lines from Shakespeare's play The Tragedie of Julius Cæsar, (Cassius to Marcus Brutus, Act 1, Scene 2).
- "O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
- There was a Brutus once that would have brookt
- Th'eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
- As easily as a king."
One of the main charges of the senatorial faction that plotted against Julius Caesar after he had the Roman Senate declare him dictator for life, was that he was attempting to make himself a king, and a co-conspirator Cassius, enticed Brutus' direct descendant, Marcus Junius Brutus, to join the conspiracy by referring to his ancestor.
L. J. Brutus is a leading character in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece and in Nathaniel Lee's Restoration tragedy (1680), Lucius Junius Brutus; Father of his Country.
In The Mikado, Nanki-poo refers to his father as "the Lucius Junius Brutus of his race".
The memory of L. J. Brutus also had a profound impact on Italian patriots, including those who established the ill-fated Roman Republic in February 1849.
Brutus was a hero of republicanism during the Enlightenment and Neoclassical periods. In 1789, at the dawn of the French Revolution, master painter Jacques-Louis David publicly exhibited his politically charged masterwork, The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons, to great controversy.
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Famous quotes containing the words brutus, literature and/or art:
“Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest—
For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men -
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)