Rhetorical Strategies Used In Julius Caesar

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During William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the great Roman leader Julius Caesar is killed by a band of conspirators who claimed to have loved Caesar, but “loved Rome more” and believed that he was too ambitious to be the leader of Rome, and would've become a dictator. For Caesar’s funeral, one of his closest advisors, Mark Antony asks Brutus, one of the conspirators to speak at Caesar’s funeral in order to bury him. Brutus agrees as long as Antony swears that he will not insult or refute the reasoning behind the conspirator’s killing of Caesar. However, using various rhetorical devices, Anthony is able to disparage the argument of the conspirators and rile up the citizens of Rome. He convinces the citizens of the greatness of Caesar and the horrible misdeeds of the …show more content…
Thus, by using a myriad of rhetorical devices and tools, such as epimone, aporia, rhetorical questions, paralepsis, and apostrophe, Antony is able to persuade the crowd to turn against the conspirators and agree with his argument that the killing of Caesar was a great wrong and that the conspirators should face punishment. In his funeral oration for Caesar, Mark Antony uses various rhetorical strategies to convince the audience that the systematic killing of Caesar was wrong and that the conspirators should be punished. Often throughout his speech, Antony uses the rhetorical strategy of epimone, which is the repetition of a certain expression in order to pinpoint a certain idea. He uses this to say how the conspirators. However, by saying this Antony makes the audience question whether the men were actually honorable in