Oxford Dictionaries’ Oxford Words blog marks the Ides of March, with a post entitled “Beware the Ides of March! Get up to your elbows in the language of Julius Caesar .”
[Today, March 15] is the Ides of March, a day made infamous by the prophetic soothsayer from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. With a “Tongue shriller then all the Musicke,” he warns the skeptical emperor to “Beware the Ides of March” at the top of Act One. Eight scenes later, the Ides arrives and (spoiler alert) Caesar is slain on the floor of the Senate.
As a concept, there is nothing particularly inauspicious about the Ides of March or of any other month. It was a perfectly ordinary element of the Roman calendar, intended to mark the occurrence of the full moon (which actually falls on the 16th this year). For a Protestant audience like Shakespeare’s though, the invocation of a “Romish” means of telling time, especially with its rather pagan dependence on the lunar cycle, would have sounded more than a little ominous. Mix in a mysterious stranger, a lion wandering the Capitol, and a “Statue spouting blood,” all with just a dash of political assassination, and it’s no surprise that the Ides has become the most memorable date in all of Shakespeare’s canon.
Equally memorable, for those old enough to remember, is the Canadian comedy duo Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster’s first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in May 1958. Wayne and Schuster
performed “Rinse the Blood Off My Toga,” a wry historical parody of the type they excelled at. In tough detective-story style, private eye Flavius Maximus (Wayne) pursued Brutus (Shuster) for the murder of Julius Caesar.
Don’t ignore the soothsayer! Always pay attention to the haruspex and the augur and consult your oracles. Or just don’t try to be all king-y & sleep with all your friends’ wives. Either way. I’ve ordered Et Tu, Brute?: The Murder of Caesar and Political Assassination but you can’t go wrong with Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy