Cowards Die Many Times Before Their

Spoken by Julius Caesar himself in Act II, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar (c. 1599), as he dismisses his wife Calphurnia's pleas to stay home on the Ides of March after she has had ominous dreams. The speech is a piece of Stoic bravado: Caesar argues that since death must come, fearing it is irrational. The dramatic irony is sharp — the audience knows he will be assassinated that day — and the line has since become one of Shakespeare's most quoted meditations on courage and mortality.