Julius Caesar was stabbed to death today, on the Ides of March.
You'd think calendars would be simple things but apparently not. The Roman calendar originally had only ten months. You can see a relic of this in the names of the last four months of the year, derived from the Latin words for 7, 8, 9 and 10. There were four 31 day months and the rest were 30 days. These were referred to as "full" and "hollow" respectively.
The system left the remaining 50 odd days of the year as an unorganized "winter", although Licinius Macer's lost history apparently stated the earliest Roman calendar employed intercalation instead, and Macrobius claims the 10 month calendar was allowed to shift until the summer and winter months were completely misplaced, at which time additional days belonging to no month were simply inserted into the calendar until it seemed things were restored to their proper place. If this sounds disturbingly casual, it is.
When the kingdom of Rome transitioned to the Roman Republic, an effort was made to fix the calendar, and went to the other extreme by trying to merge traditional Roman ideas with Greek. The result was a model of baroque complexity. The Republican calendar followed Greek calendars in assuming a lunar cycle of 29 1⁄2 days and a solar year of 12 1⁄2 synodic months (368 3⁄4 days), which align every fourth year after the addition of two intercalary months. Two months were added at the end of the year to complete the cycle during winter, January and February. The intercalary month, sometimes known as Mercedonius, was inserted every two years.
The Romans did not follow the usual Greek practice in alternating 29- and 30-day months and a 29- or 30-day intercalary month every other year. Instead, their 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 8th months had 31 days each; all the other months had 29 days except February, which had 28 days in common years, for a total of 355 days. The Roman intercalary month always had 27 days, but was placed within the month of February, in between the 23rd and 24th. This system, if you can call it that, seems to have arisen from Roman superstitions concerning the numbering and order of the months, inherited from from Pythagorean superstitions concerning the luckiness of odd numbers.
There were three principle days in each month: Kalends (the first day of the month); Nones, the 7th day of full months and 5th day of hollow ones, being 8 days before the Ides in every month, eight being known as nine to the Romans, hence the name; and the Ides, the 15th day of full months and the 13th day of hollow ones, a day less than the middle of each month.
These are thought to reflect a prehistoric lunar calendar, with the kalends proclaimed after the sighting of the first sliver of the new crescent moon a day or two after the new moon, the nones occurring on the day of the first-quarter moon, and the ides on the day of the full moon. The kalends of each month were sacred to Juno and the ides to Jupiter. The day before each was known as its eve, and the day after each was considered particularly unlucky.
In modern times, the Ides of March is best known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. 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 no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Theater of Pompey, where he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, "The Ides of March are come", implying that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied "Aye, Caesar; but 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 and gossip columnist to the ancient world, Suetonius, identifies the "seer" as a haruspex named Spurinna. A haruspex is one who divines the future by examination of the entrails of sacrificial animals.
Caesar's death was a closing event in the crisis of the Roman Republic, and triggered the civil war that would result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian (later known as Augustus). 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. Suetonius and the historian Cassius Dio characterised the slaughter as a religious sacrifice, noting that it occurred on the Ides of March at the new altar to the deified Julius.
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