The Ideas of March is March 15, a day in the Roman calendar that became infamous for the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Jacob Sider Jost, Associate Professor of English at Dickinson College, joined The Spark to share more about the Ides of March.

 

Where did the phrase, beware the Ides of March, where did that come from?

 "Beware the Ides of March is a line from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar… And so, Shakespeare wrote, he wasn't the first to write a tragedy on this topic, but he wrote a tragedy about the assassination of Julius Caesar, and it's really two tragedies because it's the story of Caesar and his death, and then the sort of greatest conspirator Brutus, and then he dies at the end of the play."

 

 What was the reasons behind the plot to kill him?

"Rome had for the couple of centuries up to the life of Caesar had been a Republic, and it had a Senate, and it had some things that sound a bit like modern American democracy, but it was basically an oligarchy, a powerful elite of inherited senators sort of dominated Roman political life. But it was unstable. There were power struggles through the first century BCE where individuals tried to sort of take full power in Rome. And when Julius Caesar came back to Rome in that fifth decade BCE, he had just defeated Pompey, who was another sort of general fighter. And it looked to the conspirators that Caesar was going to take over, become a single ruler just in himself, become an emperor, and abolish the republic. Now, in the end, that's what happened. His grandnephew Augustus Caesar took over, became emperor, and the Roman Empire went for hundreds of years after that. But that's what the conspirators were trying to prevent. They were trying to keep Rome a republic."

 

 Why do you think Julius Caesar’s assassination still captures people’s imaginations hundreds of years later?

"It's been performed on multiple stages in multiple countries and has been with us for almost, you know, over 400 years. And so, the language of Shakespeare and the power of the story keep people coming back to Julius Caesar in the Ides of March."

Listen to the podcast to hear the entire interview.  

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