Julius Caesar and the Danger of Punishment Without Due Process

American politics has been haunted by Julius Caesar for a long time.

From Abigail Adams seeing herself in Portia, to the eerie echoes between Lincoln’s assassination and Shakespeare’s play, to recent productions that dress Caesar in a red tie and long coat, we keep returning to this Roman story to make sense of our own crises. It’s tempting to treat every controversial leader as “Caesar,” every opponent as “Brutus,” and every political drama as a rehearsal of the Ides of March.

But that comparison only goes so far. George III wasn’t Caesar, Lincoln wasn’t Caesar, and neither is any modern president, no matter how cleverly staged the production.

There is, however, something in Shakespeare’s play that speaks directly to our current moment: its obsession with punishment, power, and what we would now call due process.

Shakespeare’s Rome and the Question of Procedure

At the heart of Julius Caesar is the question of how a republic should punish. First, the conspirators decide that Caesar deserves death for his supposed ambition to become king. Later, Caesar’s allies in the new triumvirate decide the conspirators—and plenty of others—deserve to die for killing him.

In both cases, someone with power decides who is dangerous and what “justice” looks like. What’s missing is any genuine process.

Shakespeare was writing at a time when legal procedures were being formalized in England—appeals, hearings, protections against arbitrary punishment. He didn’t use the phrase “due process,” but his plays return again and again to the same concern: Who gets to decide guilt? By what steps? And can that decision be questioned?

Two brief, easily overlooked moments in Julius Caesar make the danger of skipping those steps painfully clear.

“I Am Not Cinna the Conspirator”: When the Mob Becomes the State

Right after the famous assassination scene and the dueling speeches by Brutus and Antony, the play takes a sharp turn into chaos.

Antony’s fiery rhetoric has turned the crowd into a lynch mob. They rush into the streets looking for conspirators to kill and run into a man named Cinna. Not Cinna the conspirator—Cinna the poet.

They ask his name, hear “Cinna,” and that’s all they need. He protests, “I am not Cinna the conspirator,” but it doesn’t matter. They tear him to pieces.

At first glance, this looks like pure mob violence, the opposite of official state action. But Shakespeare is doing something more subtle. The scene shows what punishment looks like when there’s no process at all:

• No time to check which Cinna they’ve actually found.
• No opportunity to test his claim of innocence.
• No requirement to say clearly why he’s being punished.

And then it gets darker. Once he tells them he’s a poet, the crowd changes its story: they’ll kill him “for his bad verses” instead. The reason for his death shifts mid-attack.

That’s the key point. Without due process, those in power—whether they’re a street mob or a government agency—can change the reason for punishment on the fly. They can move from “we think you’re a conspirator” to “we don’t like your poetry” without ever pausing to ask whether either charge holds up.

The scene may be brutal and exaggerated, but the logic is familiar. When authorities refuse to explain why someone is being targeted, or keep their justifications vague or shifting, it becomes impossible to challenge the decision in good faith. The person’s identity, intentions, or actual actions don’t really matter; what matters is that the punishment is convenient.

Due process, at minimum, forces those who punish to:

• Name the person correctly,
• State clearly what the accusation is,
• Allow time and space for that accusation to be answered.

Without those steps, everyone is potentially “Cinna”—at the mercy of whoever happens to hold the club.

“Their Names Are Pricked”: Lists, Proscriptions, and Secret Decisions

If Cinna’s death is a small, chaotic picture of justice gone wrong, Act 4 opens with a colder, more chilling one.

Marc Antony, Octavius (the future Augustus Caesar), and Lepidus sit down to consolidate their power. In a few short lines, they calmly decide which Romans will be killed by proscription—legalized political murder dressed up as administrative necessity.

There is no trial. No confrontation. No defense. Just a list.

“These many, then, shall die; their names are pricked.”

The horrors here are different from those of the mob:

• The decision is tidy and bureaucratic.
• The killers never have to face the people they condemn.
• There is no public explanation, no appeal, no record beyond the list itself.

Roman historians saw Octavius’s proscriptions as some of his worst crimes. Shakespeare compresses that horror into eight lines to show us what power looks like when it doesn’t even bother with appearances. It’s not heat-of-the-moment rage or mistaken identity—it’s pure, unaccountable decision-making about who gets to live and who must disappear.

You don’t have to equate deportation with death to hear echoes of this in modern systems where:

• A single official can revoke a visa or immigration status on vague “security” grounds.
• People are detained or removed without a hearing, or with only the thinnest of formalities.
• Families and lawyers aren’t told where someone has been taken.
• There’s no clear way to appeal—or even find out what the accusation actually is.

The mechanism is different, but the structure is similar: names on a list, reasons unstated or shifting, power operating out of sight.

Julius Caesar as a Play About Getting People Wrong

One critic calls Julius Caesar a play about “categorical error”—about killing someone because you think they’re one thing, only to find out you were wrong.

That theme runs everywhere:

• The conspirators kill Caesar for what they fear he might become.
• The mob kills the wrong Cinna, then decides they’d kill the right one for a different reason anyway.
• The triumvirate kills people not because of what they’ve done, but because their continued existence is inconvenient.

In all these cases, identity and guilt are assumed, not tested. The play suggests that only something like due process—rules about evidence, procedure, and accountability—can slow that rush to judgment and give reality a chance to interfere.

Without it, error is not an accident; it’s built into the system.

Why This Matters for a Republic

Julius Caesar has long been tied to American ideas of liberty and republican government. The founders read it, quoted it, and worried about its lessons. If we want to claim that heritage, we can’t just borrow the dramatic bits—the stabbing, the speeches, the talk of tyranny.

We also have to hear what the play says about how a free state punishes.

Shakespeare pushes his scenarios to the extreme—lynchings, assassinations, mass executions—so that his point is impossible to miss: when punishment becomes arbitrary, when reasons are vague or constantly shifting, when there’s no serious process to test accusations, liberty is already in danger, no matter what the laws say on paper.

You don’t have to imagine yourself as Caesar or Brutus to feel this. It’s enough to picture yourself as:

• Cinna the Poet, caught up in someone else’s rage and misreading, or
• One of the unknown Romans whose name sits on a list, “pricked” by leaders you’ll never meet.

Julius Caesar reminds us that the real line between a republic and something darker isn’t just who sits in power, but how that power can act against the people it governs. If due process erodes, if punishment becomes a matter of convenience rather than proof, the republic Shakespeare’s Romans claim to defend is already lost.

And that, more than any costume or clever update, is what makes the play feel so unnervingly close to home.