love how mark antony in caesar’s funeral speech after julius caesar’s death is him just sarcastically complimenting brutus and emotionally manipulating the crowd until they hate brutus.
he starts off with “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” to get the audience to listen to him because no one likes obvious flattery (especially since most of the crowd hates caesar at this point, they would also start to dislike antony if he started off with praise and then his speech would not be effective), especially since brutus has managed to convince them that caesar is bad and that he was enslaving the romans in the name of patriotism. this also makes the speech a turning point in the play, because antony uses words that initially sound sincere (like “noble Brutus”, “Brutus is an honourable man”, and other such words of irony). however, the repetition makes the words sound more ironic and it also implies that he has negative feelings towards brutus for murdering caesar
he also uses emotional manipulation (“You all did love him once, not without cause” ← he is accusing the crowd for being reasonable and also calling them “brutish beasts” for they once loved and supported him & “My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar” ← the metaphor is used to show that even after caesar is dead, he still has antony’s heart + makes him more human like by expressing his emotions + the line after [“And I must pause till it come back to me”] gives the crowd he is speaking to time to really think about their beliefs and feelings, and also successfully go against brutus AND he weeps during his pause, which would pull heartstrings in both the audience watching the play and the crowd antony is speaking to) to create subtle nuances in their views and eventually turning them against brutus, which was his intention since he wanted to take revenge for caesar after the brutus’ betrayal i love julius caesar (the play) so much oml
