f allegiance. His ground for objection was that honorable man acting in a just cause need no such bond. "Swear priests and cowards and men cautelous, Old feeble carrions and such suffering sould That welcome wrongs; unto bad causes swear Such creatures as men douubt; but do not stain The even virtue of our enterprise, Nor th' insupressive mettle of our spirits, To think that or our cause or our performance Did need an oath; when every drop of blood That every Roman bears, and nobly bear, Is guilty of a several bastardy If he do break the smallest particle Of any promise that hath passed from him. (Shakespear, Act 2, scene 1, 129 - 140)Also, he objects the suggestion for killing Antony along with Caesar because he thinks that Antony will be nothing without Caesar and he does not want to kill anyone unnecessarily. Brutus says, " Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers." (Shakespear, Act 2, scene 1, 166) Here, we can see Brutus' idealism is strong and Cassius is overruled again. (Although Cassius persuades Brutus to lead the conspiracy, it was Brutus, blinded by his idealism, who persuaded himself to join the conspiracy.) (Wright, P. 22)(The trouble with idealism is that it can so easily blind those who possess it, and Brutus is blinded by his idealism. His tragic flaw, idealism, makes him to make initial decision, arrived at with such difficulty, that Caesar has to die. Brutus is wrong. Yet when we read carefully, the soliloquy in the garden, it becomes obvious that Brutus is deceiving himself. He confesses that he has "no personal cause" to fear Caesar and furthermore, that he has never known of potential of tyranny in Caesar. His honor and nobility were manipulated by Cassius and at the end, he finishes his life tragically by suiciding. The tragedy of Brutus lies here. Not that he attempted to free the republic of Rome from a tyrannous dictator and was killed in the action; but that, with the best of mot...
