After reading Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, I watched the DVD version with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, and thought I should read the whole play. It was interesting how often Caesar refers to himself in the third person, as in his Commentaries (The Conquest of Gaul). I was struck by the number of familiar phrases in the play. Not only "Beware the Ides of March" and "Friends, Romans, Countrymen..." but also "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves..." and "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune..." Cassius definitely doesn't come off well, and even Brutus doesn't seem "the noblest Roman of them all."