Beware the Ides of March! This is said to be what a soothsayer warned Julius Caesar back those thousands of years ago. That was in 44 BC. It is most familiar to us because in his play Shakespeare used the phrase. That was only 500 or so years ago.
The closest we come to that “Ides” date is our March 15th. Astronomers had to work a little math magic to get to the comparative date. When the Romans were writing Calendars at that time they only had ten months in their years. And they used a lunar type of calendar.
They did count things but it wasn’t in numbers like 1 2 3 … they counted in I’s, V’s, X’s, L’s and C’s. If you think math is hard nowadays you should have pity on those poor Roman school children.
They really observed three main days of a month. Kalens was the new moon day. Then Nones was the first quarter moon and finally when the Moon was full it was Ides. And Ides was the first of the new month. You have my permission to figure out how we relate the Ides in Caesars time to March 15 in our time.
The whole upshot is that the date, thanks to Shakespeare, lives as a disastrous day because that was when all those worried Roman senators including Brutus stabbed Julius 23 times. Nowadays senators just call each other liars or idiots as they try to work their way towards the Presidency.
It turns out that William S. may have been correct about the Ides being a bad day for folks. This is of course starting with Caesar’s murder. There have been several nasty things happen on the 15th of March in the years since.
Some of them occurred in the 20th Century. Some of the more notable ones are mentioned here. Way back in 1917 Czar Nicholas II abdicated his rule of Russia ending his family’s several hundred years of rule. Then a year later he and his family were executed. That was not a pleasant retirement.
Then in 1939, Hitler and Germany occupied Czechoslovakia. This was after the Prime Minister of England, Chamberlin, had declared that they had negotiated “Peace in our Time” with Hitler.. Actually it was a major step to WWII. I guess the Russian book should have been called Peace and War because the natural sequence was reversed.
Some of the more recent disasters have been natural disasters. In 1941, on March 15th a tremendous blizzard occurred in the Great Plains of the US and Canada it killed over 60 people. There have been many other natural disasters but they weren’t necessarily on Mach 15. Mother Nature has not been very kind of late.
One of the saddest 15ths was in 1971 when CBS cancelled The Ed Sullivan Show. That began the demise of what many of us old folks call the golden years of Television.
This year I am a little worried about the Ides of April.
