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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
A passage in Seneca’s De Clementia throws light on the celebrated ‘just cause’ crux in Julius Caesar and offers a vantage point from which to make a reading of the play.
Shortly before the conspirators assault him in III, i, Caesar protests that his harshness in maintaining the banishment of Publius Cimber is not wrong and that the importunate suppliants have not given him sufficient reason to alter his determination in the matter:
Know, Caesar doth not wrong, nor without cause
Will he be satisfied.
Ben Jonson twice alluded to this passage, but both times he cited it in wording quite different from that of the Folio text. In Discoveries he gave as an example of Shakespeare's unbridled pen Caesar's supposed statement: 'Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause; Jonson labelled this line 'ridiculous'. In 1626, in the Induction to A Staple of News, Jonson had one character exclaim facetiously, 'Cry you mercy, you neuer did wrong, but with iust cause'.
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