Well, here it is the ides of March again. If you’ve read this blog over the years, you know that I’ve usually talked about the ides this time of the year. And you’ll remember that the ides, along with kalends, and nones were “markers” on the calendar used express dates in relation to the lunar phase of the month. And you probably also remember that the ides of March wasn’t anything but a date until Shakespeare made it famous in his play about Julius Caesar.
You can check some of the past blog entries if you’re really interested in the details, but which day of the month is the “ides” depends on a complicated formula of calculation that Caesar himself established when he instituted the Julian calendar. Ides of March (and May, July and October) is the fifteenth. That’s not the ides of all months — the ides of January, for example, is the thirteenth.
I’ve never seen the play Julius Caesar performed, but I did have to read it while in school. The following is from Act 1 of the play:
Caesar: Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue shriller than all the music cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.
Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March.
Caesar: What man is that?
Brutus: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.
This conversation takes place during Lupercalia, an ancient Roman religious holiday. Caesar, the Roman dictator, makes his appearance before the crowd (“press”) in the streets. From out of the crowd, a soothsayer issues his famous warning.
Now Caesar was a very superstitious man, and wasn’t the sort to take a soothsayer lightly.
Obviously, the importance of the ides of March for Caesar is that it is the day he will be assassinated — by a group of conspirators, including Brutus and Cassius. But despite numerous signs, omens, and warnings, like the soothsayers warning, his wife’s dreams of this murder, etc., Caesar goes out on the ides and gets himself killed.
Shakespeare based his play on the work Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar. In that work, the soothsayer warned Caesar to “take heed of the of the ides of March.” I guess that wasn’t quite dramatic enough for Shakespeare… he changed it to “Beware the ides of March.”
Luckily he did — can you imagine “take heed of the ides of March” ever taking off??
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