Shakespeare's Julius Caesar may very well be the most boring book I have ever been forced to read. Nevertheless, I have to write an essay about it. The characters in this play will go very far to get power. They will even go so far as to commit homicide or become total jerk-offs. So it goes.
Julius Caesar returns from his victory over Pompey and wants to be crowned ruler of Rome, actually the entire empire. He gets everyone to love him by refusing the crown three times when it is offered to him: "It was mere foolery; I did not mark it. I saw Mark Antony offer him a crown (yet "twas not a crown neither; "twas one of these coronets), and, as I told you, he put it by once; but for all that, to my thinking, he would fain have had it. Then he offered it to him again; then he put it by again; but to my thinking, he was very loath to lay his fingers off it. And then he offered it the third time. He put it the third time by, and still as he refused it the rabblement hooted and clapped their chopped hands and threw up their sweaty nightcaps and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar, for he swooned and fell down at it." - Casca, I, ii. As soon as Caesar knows that everyone supports him, Cassius fears he will rule in a tyrannical way. .
Cassius and the rest of the Senators don't want to lose their power. Because of this, a bunch of them conspire to kill Julius Caesar. Even Brutus, Caesar's friend, joins the conspiracy because Cassius uses words to manipulate him into thinking that Caesar .
will become too powerful, and that is just really a shame. Brutus says that he believes power corrupts leaders. "Th' abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power; and, to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections sway'd more than his reason. But 'tis a common proof, that lowliness is young ambition's ladder, whereto the climber-upward turns his face; but when he once attains the upmost round, he then unto the ladder turns his back, looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.
