Question

#22

Answer 1

The correct answer is “Antony wants to make the people angry by defending Caesar.”

Indeed, although he uses irony over repetition of the term “honorable” to describe Brutus and his accomplices, both the context and the excessive repetition indicate that the opposite effect is intended. Also, he cleverly uses an axiom (self-evident truth that requires no proof) when he says that people remember the evil deeds of a person after his death and that whatever good they did fades from memory.

However, again, he is seeking for the opposite emotional response as he knows that the plebs only remember good things about Caesar, which inevitably means that they will do the exact opposite of what the axiom states: they will remember his good deeds towards them and hate those who murdered him. Then he provides factual evidence of Caesar’s good deeds such as the “filling up of the general coffers” and his rejection of the crown when it was offered to him. He aims to provoke an uprising by using rhetoric to get the people to act instead of a frontal attack on Brutus and his accomplices who are still too powerful.