Message #134458

[Bianca]

                                             Ides of March Facts: Day of Doom and Debts






Brian Handwerk
for National Geographic News
March 13, 2009



                                                     Caesar: :The ides of March are come."

                                                     Soothsayer: "Aye, Caesar, but not gone."


—Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1

 


Thanks to the Bard, the bloody events of 44 B.C. forever linked March 15—also called the Ides of March—with fulfilled prophecies of doom.

"That line of the soothsayer, 'Beware the ides of March,' is a pithy line and people remember it, even if they
don't know why," said Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference at Washington, D.C.'s Folger Shakespeare Library.

Until that day Julius Caesar ruled Rome. The traditional Republican government had been supplanted by a temporary dictatorship, one that the famous leader very much wished to make permanent.

But Caesar's quest for power spawned a conspiracy to have him killed, and on March 15 a group of prominent Romans brought him to an untimely end in the Senate House.