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Ides of March

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Midpoint day in the Roman month of March
For other uses, seeIdes of March (disambiguation).
The Death of Julius Caesar (1806) byVincenzo Camuccini
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Julius Caesar

TheIdes of March (/aɪdz/;Latin:Idus Martiae,Medieval Latin:Idus Martii)[1] is the day on theRoman calendar marked as theIdus, roughly the midpoint of a month, ofMartius, corresponding to15 March on theGregorian calendar. It was marked by several majorreligious observances. In 44 BC, it became notorious as the date of theassassination of Julius Caesar, which made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.

Ides

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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: theNones (the 5th or 7th, eight days before the Ides), theIdes (the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October), and theKalends (1st of the following month).

Originally the Ides were supposed to be determined by thefull moon, reflecting thelunar origin of the Roman calendar.Martius (March) was the first month of the Roman year until as late as the mid-second century BC, an order reflected in the numerical names of the months of September (the seventh month) through December (the tenth month) not corresponding to their current position on the Gregorian calendar. In the earliest Roman calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.[2] As a fixed point in the month, the Ides accumulated functions set to occur every month, and was the day when debt payments and rents were due.[3][4]

Religious observances

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Panel thought to depict the Mamuralia, from amosaic of the months in which March is positioned at the beginning of the year (first half of the third century AD, fromEl Djem,Tunisia, inRoman Africa)

The month of Martius was named for thegod Mars, whose "birthday" was celebrated on the first, but the Ides of each month were sacred toJupiter, the Romans' supreme deity. TheFlamen Dialis, Jupiter's high priest, led the "Ides sheep" (ovis Idulis) in procession along theVia Sacra to thearx, where it wassacrificed.[5]

March retained many of its new-year ceremonies even when it was preceded on the calendar by January and February. In addition to the monthly sacrifice, the Ides of March was also the occasion of the Feast ofAnna Perenna, a goddess of the year (Latinannus) whose festival originally concluded the ceremonies of the new year. The day was enthusiastically celebrated among the common people with picnics, drinking, and revelry.[6] One source fromlate antiquity also places theMamuralia on the Ides of March.[7] This observance, which has aspects ofscapegoat or ancient Greekpharmakos ritual, involved beating an old man dressed in animal skins and perhaps driving him from the city. The ritual may have been a new-year festival representing the expulsion of theold year.[8][9]

In the laterImperial period, the Ides began a"holy week" of festivals celebratingCybele andAttis,[10][11][12] being the dayCanna intrat ("The Reed enters"), when Attis was born and found among the reeds of aPhrygian river.[13] He was discovered by shepherds or the goddess Cybele, who was also known as theMagna Mater ("Great Mother") (narratives differ).[14] A week later, on 22 March, the solemn commemoration ofArbor intrat ("The Tree enters") commemorated the death of Attis under a pine tree. A college of priests, thedendrophoroi ("tree bearers") annually cut down a tree,[15] hung from it an image of Attis,[16] and carried it to the temple of theMagna Mater with lamentations. The day was formalized as part of the official Roman calendar underClaudius (d. 54 AD).[17] A three-day period of mourning followed,[18] culminating with celebrating the rebirth of Attis on 25 March, the date of thevernal equinox on theJulian calendar.[19]

Assassination of Caesar

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Main article:Assassination of Julius Caesar
Reverse side of theIdes of March coin (adenarius) issued by Caesar's assassin Brutus in the autumn of 42 BC, with the abbreviationEID MAR (Eidibus Martiis – "on the Ides of March") under a "cap of freedom" between two daggers

In modern times, the Ides of March is best known as the date on whichJulius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC. Caesar was stabbed to death at a meeting of theSenate. As many as 60 conspirators, led byBrutus andCassius, were involved. According toPlutarch,[20] a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar on the Ides of March. On his way to theTheatre 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."[20] This meeting is famously dramatised inWilliam Shakespeare's playJulius Caesar, when Caesar is warned by thesoothsayer to "beware the Ides of March."[21][22] Roman biographerSuetonius[23] identifies the "seer" as aharuspex named Spurinna.

Caesar's assassination opened the final chapter in thecrisis of the Roman Republic. After his victory inCaesar's civil war, his death triggered a series offurther Roman civil wars that would finally result in the rise to sole power of his adopted heir Octavian. In 27 BC, Octavian became emperorAugustus, and thus he finally terminated the Roman Republic.[24]Writing under Augustus,Ovid portrays the murder as a sacrilege, since Caesar was also thepontifex maximus of Rome and a priest ofVesta.[25] On the fourth anniversary of Caesar's death in 40 BC, after achieving a victory at thesiege of Perugia, Octavian executed 300senators andequites who had fought against him underLucius Antonius, the brother ofMark Antony.[26] The executions were one of a series of actions taken by Octavian to avenge Caesar's death. Suetonius and the historianCassius Dio characterised the slaughter as areligious sacrifice,[27][28] noting that it occurred on the Ides of March at the new altar to thedeified Julius.

See also

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References

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  1. ^Anscombe, Alfred (1908).The Anglo-Saxon Computation of Historic Time in the Ninth Century(PDF).British Numismatic Society. p. 396.Archived(PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022.
  2. ^Scullard, H.H. (1981).Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic. Cornell University Press. pp. 42–43.ISBN 9780801414022.
  3. ^Sarit Kattan Gribetz, "A Matter of Time: Writing Jewish Memory into Roman History,"AJS Review 40:1 (2016), p. 58, n. 4.
  4. ^Agnes Kirsopp Michels,The Calendar of the Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 78.
  5. ^Scullard, H.H.Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic. p. 43.
  6. ^Scullard, H.H.Festivals and Ceremonies of the Roman Republic. p. 90.
  7. ^Lydus, John (6th century).De mensibus 4.36.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) Other sources place it on 14 March.
  8. ^Salzman, Michele Renee (1990).On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity. University of California Press. pp. 124& 128–129.ISBN 9780520065666.
  9. ^Fowler, William Warde (1908).The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic. London: Macmillan. pp. 44–50.
  10. ^Lancellotti, Maria Grazia (2002).Attis, Between Myth and History: King, Priest, and God. Brill. p. 81.
  11. ^Lançon, Bertrand (2001).Rome in Late Antiquity. Routledge. p. 91.
  12. ^Borgeaud, Philippe (2004).Mother of the Gods: From Cybele to the Virgin Mary & Hochroth, Lysa (Translator). Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 51, 90, 123, 164.
  13. ^Gary Forsythe,Time in Roman Religion: One Thousand Years of Religious History (Routledge, 2012), p. 88; Lancellotti,Attis, Between Myth and History, p. 81.
  14. ^Michele Renee Salzman,On Roman Time: The Codex Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 1990), p. 166.
  15. ^Jaime Alvar,Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras, translated by Richard Gordon (Brill, 2008), pp. 288–289.
  16. ^Firmicus Maternus,De errore profanarum religionum, 27.1; Rabun Taylor, "Roman Oscilla: An Assessment",RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48 (Autumn 2005), p. 97.
  17. ^Lydus,De Mensibus 4.59;Suetonius,Otho 8.3; Forsythe,Time in Roman Religion, p. 88.
  18. ^Forsythe,Time in Roman Religion, p. 88.
  19. ^Macrobius,Saturnalia 1.21.10; Forsythe,Time in Roman Religion, p. 88; Salzman,On Roman Time, p. 168.
  20. ^abPlutarch,Parallel Lives, Caesar 63
  21. ^"William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene II".The Literature Network. Jalic, Inc. 2010. Retrieved15 March 2010.
  22. ^"William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene I".The Literature Network. Jalic, Inc. 2010. Retrieved15 March 2010.
  23. ^Suetonius,Divus Julius 81.
  24. ^"Forum in Rome,"Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 215.
  25. ^Ovid,Fasti 3.697–710; A.M. Keith, entry on "Ovid,"Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 128; Geraldine Herbert-Brown,Ovid and the Fasti: An Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 70.
  26. ^Melissa Barden Dowling,Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 50–51; Arthur Keaveney,The Army in the Roman Revolution (Routledge, 2007), p. 15.
  27. ^Suetonius,Life of Augustus15.Archived 31 July 2022 at theWayback Machine
  28. ^Cassius Dio48.14.2.Archived 22 November 2022 at theWayback Machine

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