Beware the Ides of March

What are the Ides of March?

If you’ve heard of the Ides of March, you probably know you’re supposed to beware them. Why? In ancient Rome, the Ides of March were equivalent to our March 15. In the Roman calendar, this date corresponded to several religious observances. The Romans considered the Ides of March a deadline for settling debts. But – in our modern world – if you’ve heard of the Ides of March, it’s probably thanks to William Shakespeare. In his play Julius Caesar, a soothsayer attracts Caesar’s attention and tells him:

Beware the ides of March.

Caesar demands:

What man is that? Set him before me, let me see his face.

When the soothsayer repeats his warning, Caesar dismisses him, saying:

He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.

Then, two acts later, Caesar is assassinated on the steps of the Senate.
In the play – and in reality – Julius Caesar was indeed assassinated on the Ides of March, or March 15, in the year 44 BCE. So, while Julius Caesar should have been wary about the Ides of March, the rest of us don’t need to worry

Marking the months

In the ancient Roman calendar, each month had an Ides. For the months of March, May, July, and October, the Ides fell on the 15th day. In every other month, the Ides fell on the 13th day.

The word Ides derives from a Latin word that means to divide. In the beginning, the Ides marked the full moons, but because calendar months and lunar months were different lengths, they quickly got out of step.

The Romans also had a name for the first day of every month: the Kalends. Our word calendar derives from Kalends. In fact, our modern calendar is very much like the one that Julius Caesar enacted the year before his death. It had 365 days and 12 months each year. It even took into account the fact that Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a whole number of days, by adding a leap day every few years.

Top Ten Reasons to Beware the Ides of March
March 15 will live in infamy beyond the murder of Julius Caesar. Here are 10 events that occurred on that date:

1. Assassination of Julius Caesar, 44 B.C.
Conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus stab dictator-for-life Julius Caesar to death before the Roman senate. Caesar was 55.

2. A Raid on Southern England, 1360
A French raiding party begins a 48-hour spree of rape, pillage and murder in southern England. King Edward III interrupts his own pillaging spree in France to launch reprisals, writes historian Barbara Tuchman, “on discovering that the French could act as viciously in his realm as the English did in France.”

3. Samoan Cyclone, 1889
A cyclone wrecks six warships—three U.S., three German—in the harbor at Apia, Samoa, leaving more than 200 sailors dead. (On the other hand, the ships represented each nation’s show of force in a competition to see who would annex the Samoan islands; the disaster averted a likely war.)

4. Czar Nicholas II Abdicates His Throne, 1917
Czar Nicholas II of Russia signs his abdication papers, ending a 304-year-old royal dynasty and ushering in Bolshevik rule. He and his family are taken captive and, in July 1918, executed before a firing squad.

5. Germany Occupies Czechoslovakia, 1939
Just six months after Czechoslovak leaders ceded the Sudetenland, Nazi troops seize the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, effectively wiping Czechoslovakia off the map.

6. A Deadly Blizzard on the Great Plains, 1941
A Saturday-night blizzard strikes the northern Great Plains, leaving at least 60 people dead in North Dakota and Minnesota and six more in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. A light evening snow did not deter people from going out—“after all, Saturday night was the time for socializing,” Diane Boit of Hendrum, Minnesota, would recall—but “suddenly the wind switched, and a rumbling sound could be heard as 60 mile-an-hour winds swept down out of the north.”

7. World Record Rainfall, 1952
Rain falls on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion—and keeps falling, hard enough to register the world’s most voluminous 24-hour rainfall: 73.62 inches.

8. CBS Cancels the “Ed Sullivan Show,” 1971
Word leaks that CBS-TV is canceling “The Ed Sullivan Show” after 23 years on the network, which also dumped Red Skelton and Jackie Gleason in the preceding month. A generation mourns.

9. Disappearing Ozone Layer, 1988
NASA reports that the ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere has been depleted three times faster than predicted.

10. A New Global Health Scare, 2003
After accumulating reports of a mysterious respiratory disease afflicting patients and healthcare workers in China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, the World Health Organization issues a heightened global health alert. The disease will soon become famous under the acronym SARS (for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome).

Not everything that has happened in mid-March has been a tinged with badness. Here are 10 landmark events that happened on a March 15th.

1767: Andrew Jackson is born. The future U.S. President was born a region that sits in both North Carolina and South Carolina.

1781: The Battle of Guilford Court House.  Outnumbered British forces led by Lord Cornwallis route an American revolutionary army in North Carolina.

1783: Washington averts Army mutiny. George Washington convinces Continental Army officers to  step down from a potential mutiny because of lack of payment from Congress.

1820: Maine becomes the 23rd state. Maine gains admission to the Union as part of the Missouri Compromise.

1913: Wilson holds the first Presidential press conference ever. The new President holds an official press event for about 100 reporters at the White House where he speaks to them as a group.

1916: Wilson orders troops to Mexico. President Woodrow Wilson orders a force of more than 4,000 U.S. troops to cross the border in an attempt to disrupt Pancho Villa.

1917: Tsar Nicholas II abdicates in Russia.  The Tsar was unable to find a functional successor, which was a key moment in the Russian Revolution.

1965: Johnson urges passage of Voting Rights Act. About one week after the violence in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson tells Congress it must pass the Act in a nighttime address to lawmakers and the nation.

1985: First Internet domain name registered.  It was called  symbolics.com and it belonged to Massachusetts computer company.

1990: Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as President of the Soviet Union.  Gorbachev served in this elected position, which was new to the Soviet Union, until December 25, 1991.