Note to Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 3, line 10, "a tempest dropping fire"

Return to Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 3, line 10

Much of what Casca says is derived from this passage in North's Plutarch:

Certainly, destenie may easier be foreseene, then avoyded: considering the straunge and wonderfull signs that were sayd to be seene before Caesars death. For, touching the fires in the element, and spirites running up and downe in the night, and also these solitarie birdes to be seene at noone dayes sittinge in the great market place: are not all these signes perhappes worth the noting, in such a wonderfull chaunce as happened? But Strabo the Philosopher wryteth, that divers men were seene going up and down in fire: and furthermore, that there was a slave of the souldiers, that did cast a marvelous burning flame out of his hande, insomuch as they that saw it, thought he had bene burnt, but when the fire was out, it was found he had no hurt.¹

"Dropping fire" is apparently Shakespeare's imaginative interpretation of "fires in the element."

The passage in Plutarch also seems to be the inspiration for the following speech by Horatio in Hamlet :

In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets;
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun . . . .
     (1.1.113-118)

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     1Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Englished by Sir Thomas North, trans. Sir Thomas North, vol. 5 (1579. London: David Nutt, 1896) 64.