The ides of March

“Beware the ides of March!” How timely, it seems, that the Bard remains as relevant and as appropriate source of the quote above when describing the situation at Malacañang Palace.

Today, President Benigno Aquino III is besieged by all kinds of detractors for his controversial role in the Mamasapano massacre.

The Ship of State is foundering, the captain at the helm is at his wits end, trying to avoid the reefs and shoals of an angry sea, while hecklers and cynics are trying to punch holes in the ship.

Let us go back to when the quote started:

Caesar:

Who is it in the press that calls on me?

I hear a tongue shriller than all the music

Cry “Caesar!” Speak, Caesar is turn’d to hear.

Soothsayer:

Beware the ides of March. Caesar: What man is that?

Brutus:

A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

Some clarification.

“Press” in Roman times does not refer to our know-it-all members of the media but the crowd, the ordinary citizens.

Anyway, according to historical sources, Shakespeare borrowed the scene, along with other details of Caesar’s demise, from Plutarch’s Life of Julius Caesar.

An English translation was available, but its precise phrasings were not as dramatic for Shakespeare’s purposes. Where he has the soothsayer declaim, “Beware the Ides of March,” the more prosaic original notes had the soothsayer merely warning Caesar to “take heed of the day of the Ides of March.”

The “ides” of March is the fifteenth day. For other months, the ides depends on a complicated system Caesar himself established when he instituted the Julian calendar, a precursor of our own. The ides of January, for example, is the thirteenth; the ides of March, May, July, and October is the fifteenth.

The importance of the ides of March for Caesar is that it is the day he would be assassinated by a group of conspirators, including Brutus and Cassius.

Despite numerous and improbable portents — the soothsayer’s warning, some fearsome thundering, his wife’s dreams of his murder, and so on — Caesar ventures forth on the ides to meet his doom.