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Casca is a public figure who, like his fellow assassins, is opposed to Caesar’s rise to power. He plays an essential role in Julius Caesar because he acts as a sort of messenger throughout the text, reporting important events that happen off-stage to the rest of the play’s key characters. For instance, in 1.3, he tells Cicero about all of the bad omens that have been plaguing Rome recently including fire falling from the sky in the middle of a storm, a slave’s hand catching on fire but remaining unburnt, a lion stalking the Capitol streets, men made of fire, and an owl screeching in the middle of the day. Casca interprets these strange sightings as proof from the gods that dark times are ahead for the Roman people. Casca’s report contributes to the sense of foreboding that infects nearly every scene leading up to Caesar’s assassination.
Casca’s most important report occurs during 1.2, when he relates to Cassius and Brutus how Antony offered the crown to Caesar three times before a cheering crowd and how each time Caesar declined it. Casca explains, however, that he believes Caesar to be the consummate actor, lulling the populace into believing that he has no personal ambition. He then says that Caesar proceeded to have an epileptic fit shortly after rejecting the crown for the third time. This piece of information is crucial because it supports Cassius’s claim at the start of the scene that Caesar is physically weak and unfit to govern the Roman people. Casca’s conference with Cassius and Brutus is essential to the text as a whole because the information that Casca relays to his fellow conspirators (and therefore the audience) is the catalyst that sets the assassination plot in motion.
