I know — I’ve talked about this before, but it’s kind of becoming a tradition that I discuss the Ides of March every year when it comes around. So you probably won’t be learning anything new — if you want to just skip todays reading, I’ll understand.
On the Roman calendar, the midpoint of every month was known as the ides. So the Ides of March was just a single day on the Roman calendar, and even though “ides” is plural, it denotes only a single day that happens to fall in the middle of the month. Ides were just a name give to a division of the month and every month had its ides.
But thanks to Shakespeare and his play Julius Caesar, the ides, and specifically, the Ides of March, have become associated with bad luck. The famous words from the play, “beware the ides of March,” never meant that the Ides of March itself was, or is, sinister. The words only referred to a normal day on the Roman calendar.
If you’ve read Julius Caesar, you know that Caesar died because some senators thought he desired too much power and they thought they would save the republic by doing him in. Again, it didn’t exactly work out the way they planned… so I’m not sure about the current cast of politicians, but if you’re not one of them, the ides of March will probably feel like any other day of the month.
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