Mark Antony’s speech: A masterpiece of oratory

The English poet and playwright William Shakespeare is recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists.
“Julius Caesar” (1599) is one of his major tragedies. It is the tragic story of political rivalries in ancient Rome.
Fearing Julius Caesar will become a popular tyrant, Brutus and Cassius plot to assassinate him. On the day agreed for the assassination Caesar is nearly persuaded to stay at home by his wife Calphurnia’s fateful dreams. He decides to go to the Senate, ignoring a soothsayer’s warning and a letter that names all the conspirators, and is stabbed. Brutus calms the citizens attending Caesar’s funeral and spares Mark Antony, Caesar’s trusted companion and allows him to speak to the people.
Mark Antony starts talking to a crowd that is already convinced of the rightfulness of Brutus’s cause. He addresses them by “You gentle Romans” to achieve what’s called “captatio benevolentiae”, that is gaining the auditorium’s sympathy. The term “Romans” has a good purpose: waking up the people’s national consciousness and subconsciently reminding them
To capture their attention, Mark Antony tells them to “lend me your ears”, a short phrase that show us that Mark Antony is a good orator who is not imperative, like Brutus. To calm the crowd, he tells them that he is not here to praise Caesar. He continues with an aphorism saying that after one dies people only remember the bad things about him and they forget all the good things he has done, a subtle allusion to Julius Caesar. He is ironic: he repeatedly calls Brutus “noble” and “honorable”. He says he doesn’t deny that Brutus is an honorable man and that Brutus blames Caesar for ambition and then he expresses doubt about all that with an “if”: “If it were so”. We notice that, a great orator, he never says directly what he has to say; he only insinuates things and makes the auditorium put the pieces together. He continues by saying that only under the