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Julius Caesar, a la Shmoop Greetings, fellow countrymen. I am Brutus…

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….Okay, okay, you all probably know me for my um, shaky moral compass…

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…you know – murdering my good friend…

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…who, uh, also happened to be a beloved Roman general and senator…

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…but I swear this wasn’t just some popularity contest gone wrong.

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I mean, I did think that Caesar was getting too popular.

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I was afraid that he was going to become the king of Rome…

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…but it’s not like I wanted to be king instead! I just wanted no kings! Not even

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the nice kind!

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Just a good old fashioned republic…

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…where everybody gets a voice.

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Well, except the dead guy.

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Okay, I admit… I guess we could have tried more, um, republican techniques, but it’s

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not like we could have voted for the people to stop liking him!

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Plus, I had my friend Cassius breathing down my neck.

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He was all “Caesar thinks he’s soooo cool” and “nobody even likes him” and “we

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need to murder him before he becomes a vicious dictator…”

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Talk about pressure.

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It’s especially uncomfortable when, at your murder victim’s funeral, after you’ve

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gone on and on about how you did it all for the love of your country…

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….it turns out that the guy you killed bequeathed all his money to the citizens of that country.

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Doesn’t really make you look like you love your country all that much.

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But I did, I swear… I was just misguided in my love…

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Overly eager, pressured, a little obsessive – like that guy who keeps messaging you

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on OKCupid…

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Before this murder thing, I used to be one of the good guys. Well-loved in the community,

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rubbing elbows with rising stars like Caesar, a good husband and a hard worker…

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…but my love of country made me lose it all.

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I lost my wife… she killed herself because I was so obsessed with Rome I’d forgotten

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about her.

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I lost my friend Cassius to the war…

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…and then I lost the war.

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And then, after all that, I lost myself.

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Mine is a tale of caution: love can make you do crazy things. Like, really crazy things.

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Seriously, people, don’t murder your friends.

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But while I majorly screwed up with Rome, I didn’t lose the love of my life completely.

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See, after I realized that the war was lost, and I killed myself…

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…Antony, Caesar’s ally, spoke over my dead body. He said that, in spite of the huge

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mess I helped create…

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….I was the only one who did it because I truly loved my country.

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So… yeah. At least I’ve got that going for me.

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