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George Mandel, The Other Brutus: On Decius in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Notes and Queries, Volume 59, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 68–69, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjr245
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DECIUS Brutus is a minor character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, who appears in the first three acts of the play but speaks in only two of them. If commentators devote any space to him it is almost always because of his role in persuading Caesar to go to the Senate House against the wishes of Calphurnia. I would like to draw attention to another aspect of the part, namely, Decius's closeness to Cassius and comparative distance from Marcus Brutus. It is a well-known feature of the play that Marcus Brutus inspires intense loyalty among his followers. Decius, I shall try to show, is an exception; his main loyalty lies elsewhere.
An indication of this comes just after the assassination of Caesar. When Caska says ‘Go to the pulpit, Brutus’, Decius immediately adds ‘And Cassius too’ (III.i.84),1 which sounds like an attempt to prevent Cassius from being displaced entirely by Brutus as leader of the group. It is probably not by chance, then, that Cassius's words a few lines later, ‘Brutus shall lead, and we will grace his heels' (III.i.120), are spoken in response to something said by Decius (‘What, shall we forth?’). They are Cassius's delayed reply to Decius's call on him to go to the pulpit. Cassius is informing both Brutuses that he has no intention of competing with Marcus Brutus for the leadership. His words confirm and make more explicit the message he sent a moment earlier by his response to Brutus's rather surprising call to the conspirators to stoop and bathe their hands in Caesar's blood. Cassius says ‘Stoop, then, and wash’ (III.i.111); the word ‘then’ here seems to mean ‘If that's what you, Brutus, want.’
