Delius (Jahrbuch, xvii, pp.67-81) has made an exhaustive comparison of the whole Tragedy with the passages from Plutarch; and arrives at practically the same conclusions as MacCallum: That Shakespeare's indebted to North’s translation [of Plutarch] is not so great as has been generally supposed. Lloyd is, I believe, the first to have suggested that the general tone of Antony’s oration seems to indicate an acquaintance with the speech given to Antony by Appian in his history of the Civil Wars, a translation of which was made by Bynniman in 1578. That there is a resemblance may not be denied; but if this work were known to Shakespeare, he has failed to make extensive use of it; this one passage is the single place where any marked similiarity is shown. Plutarch’s account of Antony’s oration is meager, to say the least, and Shakespeare may, therefore, have consulted Appian when his main authority failed him. Lloyd also opines that Antony’s sarcastic iteration of ‘honourable,’ as applied to Brutus and Cassius, was suggested by passages in Cicero’s Second Philippic; but this is, I think, very doubtful; there was no translation of the Philippics in Shakespeare’s time. Any strong corroborative proof of Shakespeare’s use of Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars is lacking, albeit both Steevens and Malone quote passages in support of this, notably in reference to Caesar’s exclamation, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ and to the number of wounds said to have been received by Caesar; but Philemon Holland’s is the earliest translation of Suetonius, and its date (1606) is by several years later than the date of composition of Julius Caesar. Dr Sykes asserts that, besides Plutacrch, Shakespeare ‘knew and used ‘Appian, Dio, Ovid, and possibly Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Virgil’s Georgics, Boccaccio’s Life of Caesar, and Eedes’ Latin play.’ That Shakespeare was acquainted with Latin authors is abundantly shown throughout his works, but in regard to Dion Cassius’s Annals of the Roman People (Dio in Syke’s list) the case is different. No translation of the Annals appeared until that by Manning in 1704, and had Shakespeare had sufficient knowledge of Greek to read this author in the original he need not have resorted to North’s translation of Plutarch, which, by incontrovertible evidence, we know he used. Dion Cassius must, therefore, I think, be excluded on the same grounds as Suetonius; so likewise Valerius Maximus, a translation of whose ‘Acts and Sayings of the Noble Romans’ was first given by Speed in 1678.
