I have heard and/or read that Mark Anthony’s dramatic speech in Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar is a fairly faithful translation of the original Latin speech. In fact, I heard this just today, as my wife made reference to this belief in conversation.
It’s standard fare for students of Latin to study Cicero’s “Orations Against Cataline” (Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?) and Julius Caesar’s own write-up of what he saw and did in his conquest of Gaul, so this does not seem impossible. However my lookups via Google and Wikipedia do not turn up any backing evidence, much less the actual Latin text, which if it did exist should be well known.
There are certainly contemporary reports attesting to Mark Anthony giving an inflammatory speech at Caesar’s funeral, and Anthony’s speech in the Shakespeare play certainly uses well the models and devices of classical rhetoric. But was, or is the classical version known, or did Shakespeare make a brilliant interpolation?