The main source for Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar was North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives. Many of what we now would consider "supernatural" elements were simply ordinary parts of Roman religion.
In ancient Rome, the gods were closely connected to natural phenomena and unusual natural phenomena were considered portents of good or bad fortune. Professional seers also would closely observe both the entrails of animal sacrifices and the heavens to determine the future as...
The main source for Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar was North's English translation of Plutarch's Lives. Many of what we now would consider "supernatural" elements were simply ordinary parts of Roman religion.
In ancient Rome, the gods were closely connected to natural phenomena and unusual natural phenomena were considered portents of good or bad fortune. Professional seers also would closely observe both the entrails of animal sacrifices and the heavens to determine the future as it was divinely willed and foretold. In the play, some examples of this are Calpurnia's nightmare, the seer's warning about the Ides of March, the storm on the Ides of March, the appearance of Caesar's ghost to Brutus, and various prodigies and auguries such as those referenced in the following lines:
A lioness hath whelped in the streets.
And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.
Two critical works which discuss this theme are:
Stephen M. Buhler. "No Spectre, No Sceptre: the Agon of Materialist Thought in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar." English Literary Renaissance 26.2: (April 1996) 313–332.
Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion. Edited by David Loewenstein and Michael Witmore. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
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