"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
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Gossip has better survival instincts than virtue. Shakespeare’s line, spoken by Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, is a surgical piece of public relations: it pretends to be a shrug about human nature while quietly poisoning the room against Brutus and the other assassins. Antony isn’t offering a neutral aphorism; he’s setting the terms of memory itself, nudging the crowd toward the idea that Caesar’s “evil” (as his killers frame it) will echo, but so will theirs.
The phrasing weaponizes the afterlife of reputation. “Lives after them” gives wrongdoing a grotesque animation, as if it keeps walking around long after the body stops. “Oft interred” is colder: goodness doesn’t merely fade; it’s buried, sealed, ceremonially forgotten. Shakespeare knows that moral accounting isn’t done in private consciences but in public storytelling, where outrage is portable and praise is local.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Antony delivers the line during a funeral oration engineered to look restrained. He’s constrained by political danger, so he smuggles his argument inside a seemingly modest observation. The subtext is a dare to the crowd: if you let this murder be remembered as “good,” you’ll be participating in the burial of goodness itself. The brilliance is how it flatters the audience into indignation while maintaining plausible innocence.
It works because it understands a grim constant of politics: history is less a ledger than a jury, and scandal is the evidence that never stops being admissible.
The phrasing weaponizes the afterlife of reputation. “Lives after them” gives wrongdoing a grotesque animation, as if it keeps walking around long after the body stops. “Oft interred” is colder: goodness doesn’t merely fade; it’s buried, sealed, ceremonially forgotten. Shakespeare knows that moral accounting isn’t done in private consciences but in public storytelling, where outrage is portable and praise is local.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Antony delivers the line during a funeral oration engineered to look restrained. He’s constrained by political danger, so he smuggles his argument inside a seemingly modest observation. The subtext is a dare to the crowd: if you let this murder be remembered as “good,” you’ll be participating in the burial of goodness itself. The brilliance is how it flatters the audience into indignation while maintaining plausible innocence.
It works because it understands a grim constant of politics: history is less a ledger than a jury, and scandal is the evidence that never stops being admissible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
|---|---|
| Source | Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare — Act 3, Scene 2 (Mark Antony's funeral speech). |
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