Ides of March ! - stabbing of Julius Caesar

Today is 15^th March !!  - History is always interesting ! Did you see Rajnikanth, Sridevi starrer SP Muthuraman directed movie “Priya” shot in Singapore, with soothing music of Isaignani Illayaraja.  It was a story of Sujatha, which was distorted beyond a point !!    A cursory search on web today  revealed these as International Headlines :

•        Devastation in Gaza as Israel wages war on Hamas

•        Video shows aftermath of Houthi attack on commercial cargo ship

•        Father of Michigan school shooter found guilty of manslaughter

•        15 year old talks about her mom's detention in Russia

•        SpaceX launches Starship rocket on third test flight

•        Jury reaches verdict in trial of Michigan school shooter's father

•        Putin's critics have been silenced but the election still matters. Here's why

•        March 14 - Trump classified documents case updates

Back home, in Delhi liquor policy case: Kejriwal challenges court summons, seeks exemption from physical appearance on March 16.  A court had summoned Kejriwal to appear before it on March 16 after the ED filed a complaint saying he had skipped the summons in the Delhi liquor policy case. Kejriwal has till date skipped eight summons issued by the Enforecement Directorate in connection with the excise policy case.

India today headline :Electoral bonds: Decoding Congress’s little pockets of resistance While the BJP maintained a stark dominance in electoral bond encashments overall, data reviewed by India Today shows the Congress performed comparatively better in small pockets where its chances of winning elections were higher. The prominence of a Tamil Nadu-based lottery company and a Hyderabad-based business conglomerate as top donors, alongside the ruling BJP emerging as the primary beneficiary of electoral bonds, is not the only takeaway from the electoral bonds data published by the Election Commission.

‘One Nation, One Election’ road map: If brought in, 10 states may have Assemblies of a year or less. If the government aims for simultaneous polls in 2029, all states except those voting now would see House terms truncated, including UP, Punjab, Gujarat, Bengal

Moving away 15^th March is significant – “the Ides of March” ! what ?

The Ides of March  is the 74th day in the Roman calendar, corresponding to 15 March. It was marked by several religious observances and was a deadline for settling debts in Rome.  In 44 BC, it became notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar, which made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.

The Romans did not number each day of a month from the first to the last day. Instead, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (the 5th or 7th, 8 days before the Ides), the Ides (the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October), and the Kalends (1st of the following month). Originally the Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the lunar origin of the Roman calendar. In the earliest calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.

On Ides of March day in 44 BC, Julius  Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of the Senate. As many as 60 conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, were involved. According to Plutarch, a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar on the Ides of March. On his way to the Theatre of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, "Well, the Ides of March are come", implying that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Aye, they are come, but they are not gone."   This meeting is famously dramatised in William Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by the soothsayer to "beware the Ides of March."  The Roman biographer Suetonius identifies the "seer" as a haruspex named Spurinna.

Locals  would recall Rajnikanth playing Julius Caesar in the movie Priya !!. Caesar's assassination opened the final chapter in the crisis of the Roman Republic. After his victory in Caesar's civil war, his death triggered a series of further Roman civil wars that would finally result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian. In 27 BC, Octavian was raised to be emperor Augustus, and thus he finally terminated the Roman Republic.  Writing under Augustus, Ovid portrays the murder as a sacrilege, since Caesar was also the pontifex maximus of Rome and a priest of Vesta. On the fourth anniversary of Caesar's death in 40 BC, after achieving a victory at the siege of Perugia, Octavian executed 300 senators and equites who had fought against him under Lucius Antonius, the brother of Mark Antony. The executions were one of a series of actions taken by Octavian to avenge Caesar's death.  

The photo   is taken from Wiki Commons : By Vincenzo Camuccini - Own work, user:Rlbberlin, Public Domain,   

With regards – S Sampathkumar
15.3.2024