Antony pays Brutus a high compliment, calling him “the noblest Roman of them all.”  Some critics suggest that his real motive is to win over Brutus’ officers to his side. Antony employed a similarly deceptive strategy after Caesar’s death, when he pretended to make peace with the assassins, all the while planning to take his revenge by enraging the plebeians against them.

But you can also take Antony’s compliment at face value. Perhaps it only seems suspicious to us because our image of war stems from the two devastating world wars of the 20th century, which bitter conflicts between mutually loathing societies. But in Shakespeare’s time, armed conflict was just one of the normal methods of competition between political rivals. It wouldn’t have seemed unrealistic that a lord might praise the nobility of one of his rivals.