"The tide of times." means something.

It seems that the most famous line in Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar came early in the script, spoken by Cassius, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Edward R. Murrow famously quoted that line during his feud with Mccarthy. He did so elegantly and eloquently.

Maybe, the second most famous quote from that play is, "Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!"

I first heard that quote, as a Star Trek nerd, spoken by Christopher Plummer in The Undiscovered Country (obviously, the title itself is a reference to Hamlet).

Still, the quote from Julius Caesar that's been lingering in my brain came from the same soliloquy delivered by Antony in act 3 scene 1 of the play. It's usually on the same page as the "Cry havoc!" line.

"Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
that ever lived in the tide of times."

Antony was saying this looking upon the dead body of the slain Caesar.

Ummm, Julius Caesar was assassinated. I'm sorry if I'm spoiling an event that happened two thousand years ago, and the middle of a play that was written five hundred years ago.

The elegance of that line is sticking with me as we're seeing angry kids pulling down monuments, ruining the paintings of some of our ancestors, and the completely irreverent behavior directed toward our fairly recent ancestors.

Would I vote for a perfect clone of Julius Caesar nowadays? Absolutely not. I might actually vote for Biden over him.

Shakespeare wasn't making the point that Caesar was an influence to emulate for all eternity. The "tide of times" portion of the line is pretty damn important.

Shakespeare himself wrote this well more than a millennium after Caesar was assassinated.

Shakespeare was living in a time that we still look back upon as one of growth, and culture, and scientific expansion -- even if we still didn't know what the hell we were looking at.

It seems to me that Shakespeare understood the idea of, "A man of his time." while we're still grappling with that idea which much sloppier words.

I don't think that Shakespeare killed off Julius Caesar, in his play Julius Caesar, at the end of the second act because he wanted his play to be a propaganda piece for what Caesar wanted during his rule.

"The tide of times." means something.

The tide of times hadn't seen the Dark Ages nor the Renaissance yet. Shakespeare was wise enough to see a man, who was flawed enough to be murdered by his closest compatriots, and still have his protagonist call him the "noblest man that ever lived in the tide of tides."

That's how I think about most of our Founding Fathers, the Framers of the Constitution, generally -- the men and women who built western civilization.

Perfect? Far from. Every human being is capable of evil.

Progressive, by today's standards? Far from

Were the people like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams the best we could ask for in that tide of times? Absolutely. Without a doubt. We should regard it as a miracle that we were so lucky. Atheists should embrace God on the basis of how lucky the West was to have these people embracing the enlightenment, and trying to build a nation around it, however imperfectly.

Ya know, Picasso famously said that art is the lie that forces us to see the truth.

Antony probably never said anything resembling what he said in act 3 scene 1 of Shakespeare's play.

The wisdom is still there.