Dictators, emperors and anyone with a friend named Brutus, consider yourself warned: It’s the mother-lovin’ Ides of March.Most of us recognize the ominous warning to “Beware the Ides of March,” shouted to the titular Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, but given that no one knows what the hell an “ide” is, it usually sneaks up on us anyway. That’s a pity, because not only is the day a great time to say vague and threatening literary things to your friends, it also has one of history’s all-time greatest drinking traditions.But first off, “ides.” The Romans were big on months but not big on weeks or numbering days too specifically. The “ides” were simply the middle of the month, so for March, May, July and October this was the 15th, and the 13th for the others. You’d say to your Roman friends, “Hey, let’s schedule that orgy two days past the ides. I’ll bring the lions, if someone else can pick up some Christians.”According to the pre-450 B.C.E. Roman calendar, the new year began with March, thus the ides fell on the new year’s first full moon. To celebrate, the Romans held the festival of Anna Perenna, goddess of “long life and renewal, health and plenty." (Casual etymologists will recognize that both of the goddess’s names refer to the passage of time—words that live on in English as annual and perrenial.)The festival combined the mid-March alcohol abuse of St. Patrick’s Day with something like an ancient Bonnaroo. These sandal-wearers would camp among the blooming fruit trees in the goddess’s sacred grove just outside of Rome and then get utterly smashed. The poet Ovid reports that:The people come and drink there, scattered on the grass, And every man reclines there with his girl. Some tolerate the open sky, a few pitch tents, And some make leafy huts out of branchesAs the people drink, they prayed to Anna Perenna to grant them as many years of life as cups of wine they could drink. Even if life expectancy averaged around 28 years, that’s pretty ambitious.Today, we mostly know the ides of March as the day that Julius Caesar was killed by the Roman senators, led his protégés, Brutus and Cassius. In the Caesar section of his biography collection, the poet Plutarch claims that a soothsayer had warned Caesar to watch his back on the ides of March. En route to the theater of Pompey where the senate was waiting to do him in, Caesar passed the seer and joked out that the ides of March had come, and the seer softly replied, “Ay, they are come, but they are not gone.”While one, lesser Brutus distracted Caesar’s right hand man, Mark Antony, outside the theater, the other Brutus and his co-conspirators gathered around Caesar’s chair and—on the signal of a toga tug by Tullius Cimber—began striking a blow for democracy. Plutarch reports that Caesar, surprised by the first neck stab, fought back until he saw that his friend Brutus had drawn his dagger. As Brutus kicked him in the groin, Caesar went to the floor.Through Plutarch and Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, the ides of March remain an ominous date on the calendar and reminder that political assassination might seem like a good idea at the time, but probably will just lead to more tyranny. Four years later, the emperor Octavian took advantage of anniversary of Caesar’s death to execute some 300 of his enemies, proving that the lesson “don’t be a tyrant” had been misinterpreted as “if you’re going to be a tyrant, don’t do it half way.”So if you’re a tyrant, or if you’re friends with one, maybe take this occasion to do some serious thinking and don’t let people crowd around you. But if you’re just a regular old plebian, grab a box of wine, park yourself under a tree, and aim for immortality.
Advertisement
Advertisement