SURROUNDED by importunate suitors only moments before the climax of the tragedy, the-soon-to-be-immortal Caesar exclaims, “Hence! wilt thou lift up Olympus?” Many critics see this as the culmination of Caesar's spectacular grandiosity, soon to be spectacularly deflated. He has in his prior utterances, in fact, established himself as no minor figure in the Olympian pantheon, responding to Cassius's plea for Publius Cimber's recall from exile with “If I could pray to move, prayers would move me” (3.1.59). Like every aspiring god, Caesar avows that he is self-moved. When Decius, asking for some reason to give the Senate to explain Caesar's absence, says, “Let me know some cause,” Caesar responds with, “The cause is in my will” (2.2.69, 71). To posit the “cause” of his actions as inhering in his will, of course, is to claim functional divinity. Where will and motive are equivalents, motive no longer matters. Will becomes the expression of arbitrium, freed from rational constraints. Caesar, thus, intentionally associates himself with Zeus whom Homer depicts as a character whose “commands, threats and predictions comprise one and the same category,” a character who is simultaneously the source of all linguistic and intrinsic authority in the poems. Since he can never be either commanded or overruled, Zeus is, quite simply, the man. As Antony more hopefully than accurately observes, “When Caesar says, ‘Do this,’ it is performed” (1.2.10). Susceptible of multiple interpretations and ultimately, untrue in every sense, Antony's statement construes Caesar's speech-acts, like Zeus's, to be the equivalent of action.