Great Lines: Julius Caesar
In the Earth’s yearly trip around the sun, March 15th hails itself as the distinguished ‘Ides of March’. In the lunar Roman calendar, the ‘Ides’ were mid-month days determined by full moons, with the Ides of March as the first full moon of the new year. In ancient times, it marked the final ushering out of the old year, and was celebrated with the festival of Anna Perenna, the Roman deity of the ‘circle’ or ‘ring’ of the year (L. annus).
The Death of Julius Caesar (1806) by Vincenzo Camuccini
In modern culture, the Ides of March is more commonly known as the date of Julius Caesar’s assassination in the Roman Senate, in 44 BC. As history reports, Julius Caesar’s concentrated and dictatorial power was deemed a threat to the Roman Republic, such that upwards of 60 senators, led by Marcus Brutus and Cassius Longinus, conspired to have him lured to a Senate meeting in the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, where he was surrounded and stabbed to death.
Where the event is dramatised in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), the portentous warning of the Soothsayer to Julius Caesar is a line of potent cultural resonance: ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ Loaded with dramatic irony in the play, the phrase cautions Caesar, however vaguely, to beware his own betrayal. Despite the origins of it, writer Martin Stezano contends that ‘not only did Shakespeare’s words stick, they branded the phrase—and the date, March 15—with a dark and gloomy connotation.’ Typical of the superstition surrounding the date, author T.A. Frail outlines ten unfortunate events in history that occurred on it.
Yet in our more atheistic times, this famous Shakespearean phrase is recalled more humorously and habitually than warily, signalling the sheer entertainment people experience in recalling the date and this ancient tale of conspiracy and murder—of epic grandiosity and tragic misfortune—as a karmic one, of tyranny and comeuppance.