Julius Caesar: Logos 2 key examples

When Cassius hears that Brutus is chiefly concerned with honor above all else, he begins to craft a careful critique of Caesar that resounds with Brutus’s anxieties. On the fly, Cassius makes honor “the subject” of his story and lays out a logos-driven case for the importance of honor to himself and, further, to the cause at hand. Later, Brutus himself will rely on logos to explain his reasoning for assassinating Caesar to the crowd of plebeians that assembles after his death.

By displaying Cassius's versatility as a debater, and his ability to adopt the reasoning methods and argumentation best suited to sway his listener, Shakespeare establishes him as a particularly cunning antagonist and furthers the lengthy exploration of the power of persuasive speech and the dangers of succumbing to sweet-talking found throughout Julius Caesar.

Brutus’s major flaw in speaking to the Romans after Caesar’s death—the flaw that enables Antony to seize the moment and turn the crowd against him—is that he attempts to reach the crowd through reason and reason alone: laying out a cost-benefit analysis, he determines that he loves Rome more than Caesar and therefore must act in defense of Rome. This logos-driven justification appeals to the audience's sense of logic, and, accordingly, Shakespeare structures the speech in prose to match Brutus's matter-of-fact tone.

Shortly hereafter, Brutus will find that his words fall short of fully swaying the crowd when Antony ascends the dais and delivers his rousing call-to-grief in honor of his fallen friend. Julius Caesar presents a stark warning against the kind of clinical calculations that Brutus makes in this speech, and as Shakespeare pits this logical use of language against Antony's rhetoric of pathos, it is clear that an emotional appeal is more effective at swaying the favor of a crowd.