Note 160 — Chapter II · SHAKESPEARE’S TRANSMUTATION OF HIS MATERIAL
Reading edition
On this passage Coleridge has the note: “This seemingly strange assertion of Brutus is unhappily verified in the present day. What is an immense army, in which the lust of plunder has quenched all the duties of the citizen, other than a horde of robbers, or differenced only as fiends from ordinarily reprobate men? Caesar supported, and was supported by, such as these;—and even so Buonaparte in our days.” On this interpretation Brutus’ charge would come to nothing more than this, that Caesar had employed large armies. I believe there is a more definite reference to one passage or possibly two in the Marcus Antonius.