The Cobbler and the Tribunes in Julius Caesar

Abstract

The first scene in Julius Caesar, in which the cobbler and his fellow plebeians are confronted by their supposed leaders, the tribunes Flavius and Marullus, is the first skirmish in the play between the forces of Caesarism and those who oppose them. Dramatically, the scene opposes the humor of the equivocating cobbler, which looks forward to the graveyard scene in Hamlet, with Marullus' denunciation of the plebeians as an unthinking, many-headed hydra; their unreliability is proved later in the Forum scene, when they agree first with Brutus' speech, and then with Antony's. The scene raises some intriguing questions, first regarding the cobbler's philosophical punning, secondly with respect to the seemingly ambiguous identity of the cobbler himself (I am referring to Flavius' inability to recognize the cobbler as a cobbler because the man is dressed in his holiday clothes, and because the cobbler equivocates about his identity). Also, the seeming mysteriousness of the entire scene raises the question of whether it relates to the play in some way that is not immediately apparent to the reader. One of the paradoxes of the Stoic Chrysippus provides interesting answers to the first two questions, and helps in answering the third. The paradox was well known in antiquity. In Renaissance England, there were a number of works by Horace and Cicero, then considered to be a part of a man's education, in which the idea might be encountered.' It is mentioned five times in the work of Cicero: once in Pro Murena, twice in De Finibus and once in Academica.2 In its most basic form, it states that the wise man achieves such virtue that he is at once king, rich man, and a cobbler. More significantly,