Gaius Cassius in Symbols

Recently in Humanities we have been studying Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar”. This play is a lot more than just some thing that is preformed for an audience, it tells the story of a very important time in history.

Each table group was assigned a different character from the play, the only thing was that they had to have been a real person. My group was assigned Gaius Cassius. He was a Roman senator and was the main conspirator of Caesar’s death. He was very crucial to the play because the plot of the play is based around Caesar’s assassination. Our project task was to create a life size cut-out of our person and explain all about them by using symbols on the body. We could also use other things like body pose and colour of paper to represent key points.
   My group chose to have Cassius with a finger on his lips (as if he was keeping a secret) and him holding a shield and a baby in his other arm. The importance of his pose was because he was a conspirator and always had a secret to keep. The baby and the shield are to represent his baby boy and how he fought against Caesar in many wars. We also included a sword on his arm and a two pieces of body armor on his shoulder for the same purpose. Something we did not included was eyes but that was because we showed a brain on his head with drawings of telescopes and books to represent his love of Philosophy. In his heart area, there is a picture in a frame of him whispering to someone to kill the king because Gauis never physically did it but was all along with the plan. His legs are filled with roads and trees that show how he traveled long distances after he was defeated in many wars. The waves we added on his hip are also to represent how he traveled on water. The reason he was on ships a lot are because he burned a lot of Caesars navy, as shown on his left foot. His other foot has a coin with his face on it because he was shown on a coin for sometime too. The cutout paper we chose was red, not for aesthetic reasons but because he caused a lot of blood shed in his lifetime, 88 BC-42 BC.

Something I would do differently if I was to get the chance to re-do this project, I would probably think about and make meaning of where I put specific objects on his body. I think that maybe the coin could have gone in his hand to to represent wealth or the waves could have been used as a belt for clothing instead. I would also probably cut and paste more things because when you use a red background, things don’t really stand out.

Over-all I really enjoyed doing this project because I love drawing and creating things. I also thought that it was a cool take on modern projects because we weren’t allowed to use any words on he silhouette but instead had to be creative with our symbols and think deeper about how we would imagine this historic figure to be.