Shakespeare and the Constant Romans

Shakespeare's Romans are intensely concerned with `constancy'. Geoffrey Miles traces the Stoic origins of this Roman principle of being `always the same' and explores the varying forms it takes in writers such as Cicero, Seneca, and Montaigne. In Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, Miles argues, Shakespeare dramatizes the attractions, flaws, and self-contradictions of the Roman virtue of constancy.