What is the Ides of March? It is the 74th day of the Roman calendar, which is March 15th.
When we think about the Ides of March, we imagine that it is a cursed and dangerous day. In actual fact, ides was just a name for a day and there was nothing special about it. We get the idea of danger from William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, but without Shakespeare, most of us would probably have never heard of the expression.
Caesar was assassinated by 60 conspirators on the Ides of March in 44 BC. They chose the day, not because it had any particular significance, but because there was a meeting of the senate and Caesar would be easy to get to. Caesar had declared himself dictator for life and they wanted to kill him at the earliest opportunity. They stabbed him 23 times. Their goal was to bring back the Republic and ensure it continued, but they ended up starting the end of the Republic. People hated the assassins and it sparked civil wars. Caesar’s adopted son Octavian was the final victor and he became Emperor Augustus, the first emperor of the Roman Empire.
So, what is the Ides of March? The Ides of March is simply the Ides that was in March. Every month had an Ides. It also had a Kalends and a Nones. Kalends is where we get our word calendar from. The Romans divided their months up differently to the way we do. We count up from the beginning of the month, from 1 to 30 or 31. The Romans went the other way. They counted up to certain dates in every month.
The Romans divided their months into three parts and they had a name for each part: the Kalends, the Nones, and the Ides. The first day of every month was called the Kalends. The Romans would count up to that from the middle of the month before. So, October 1st was on the Kalends of October. September 30th would have been the day before the Kalends of October. September 29th was two days before the Kalends of October, and so on.
The Nones came after the Kalends. It was 7 days or 5 days after the Kalends, depending on how many days the month had. Romans would count up to the Nones in the same way as the Kalends, so October 2nd was six days before the Nones of October. The 3rd was five days before the Nones of October. The 4th was four days before the Nones of October, and so on up to the Nones, which was on the 7th of October.
The third point of the month was the Ides and they counted up to that in the same way. The Ides was 8 days after the Nones and would either fall on the 15th or the 13th, depending on how many days the month had. So, October 8th was eight days before the Ides of October. October 9th was seven days before the Ides of October. October 10th was six days before the Ides of October, and so on up the Ides of October, which was the 15th, or the 13th depending on the month.
So, the Ides of March, the day that Caesar was assassinated on, was 8 days after the Nones of March and 16 days before the Kalends, which would have been the 1st of April. The system of counting days from the points in the month began to die out as the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century AD. It continued off an on because the Roman traditions were too engrained to just disappear, but by the eleventh century, counting forward from the start of the month was the most common way of keeping the date.
Why did the Romans have this system in the first place? It started when they created their calendar because it was a lunar calendar. The Ides of each month was supposed to fall on the day of the full moon and the Nones and the Kalends were also pegged to different parts of the phases of the moon. The trouble was that it is very difficult to keep a lunar calendar accurate because the lunar calendar and the solar calendar don’t exactly match up. The moon doesn’t become full on the same day and it takes a lot of messing with the calendar to get it to fit. And that is one of the things Caesar was trying to fix when he reformed the calendar, before being killed on the Ides of March. Although, thinking about it, being killed on the Ides of March is probably more memorable than if he had been killed on the fourth day before the Nones of March. And this is what I learned today.
Image By Unknown author – Musei Vaticani (Stato Città del Vaticano), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49885704
Sources
https://www.history.com/news/beware-the-ides-of-march-but-why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ides_of_March
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calends
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/julius-caesar-assassinated/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/03/11/when-is-ides-of-march/72879681007/
https://www.britannica.com/story/what-is-the-ides-of-march
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/calends