Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.

These lines are spoken by Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy *Julius Caesar*. In Act II, Scene ii, on the morning of the Ides of March, Caesar’s wife Calpurnia begs him not to go to the Senate after ominous dreams and reports of strange portents. Caesar initially wavers, then steels himself with a declaration of fearlessness, contrasting the “coward” who suffers repeated anticipatory deaths with the “valiant” who meets death only once. The speech is part of Caesar’s self-fashioning as resolute and almost fated, immediately before he is persuaded by Decius Brutus to ignore the warnings—setting the stage for his assassination.

Caesar argues that fear multiplies suffering: the coward “dies” repeatedly through dread, while the brave face mortality as a single, inevitable event. The passage treats death as both universal and uncontrollable—“a necessary end” that arrives in its own time—so anxiety cannot change the outcome, only diminish life beforehand. In the play, the sentiment is double-edged: it sounds like stoic courage, yet it also reveals Caesar’s pride and susceptibility to a heroic self-image. Shakespeare uses the rhetoric of fearlessness to heighten dramatic irony: Caesar’s insistence that death is not to be feared precedes his very public, preventable death.

“Cowards die many times before their death; / The valiant never taste of death but once.”
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.”