Editorial of March 13, 2025

Springing Forward

Last weekend daylight saving time, a somewhat controversial and almost national annual time shift that is overloaded with meaning, came upon us, lengthening our days and evenings, helping us use less electricity, tempting us with a hint of warmer days to come and putting these last few weeks of freezing, sun-starved weather somewhat at bay, all after a cruel loss of an hour at 2 a.m. on Sunday. But while daylight saving time is still under a serious challenge from on high, a more gruesome day, filled with ominous predictions and grisly results, is still to come.

The Ides of March, from the Latin Idus Martiae, which translates roughly to the midpoint (Idus) of the month of March, falls on the 15th—as well as on the 15th of May, July and October. (The Ides come on the 13th of the rest of the months in our calendar.) The Ides began happily enough, celebrating the great moon, but a singular incident in the years before Christ turned the Ides of March into an unfortunate day.

The Ides of March was originally determined in the Roman calendar by the onset of the full moon. As March was for many years the first month of the year in this calendar (hence September, the seventh month; October, the eighth; November, the ninth and December, the tenth), the Ides of March would have marked the time of the first full moon of the year. It was celebrated by a variety of religious observances, most consisting of festivals, ceremonies, animal sacrifices, feasts and, later, Holy Weeks. Curiously, the Ides of every month were also the very day debt payments and rents were due.

Then it all got worse. In 44 BC, on March 15, during a meeting of the Roman Senate at the Curia of Pompey in Rome, Julius Caesar, the notorious and very wealthy 54-year-old Roman general and statesman, was assassinated. He had recently been proclaimed dictator perpetuo (dictator for life). Caesar was stabbed 23 times by a clutch of more than 60 senators who had come to fear that his unprecedented concentration of power was building up to the threat of his becoming king of the Romans, thereby undermining the Roman Republic. Some of the senators, led by Marcus Brutus and his brother-in-law Cassius Longinus, were concerned with Caesar’s authoritarianism, while others in fact were jealous of his extraordinary fortune and still others, his officers and soldiers, were displeased with the amount of their rewards for following him into the many battles the armies fought. Caesar reputedly was warned of impending harm by a seer, but the well-known prophecy was in fact written centuries later by Shakespeare for his soothsayer in “Julius Caesar,” who twice told Caesar to “Beware the Ides of March,” which Caesar did not.

Tonight, and this weekend, the Ides of March returns to its entertainment mode with not only a full moon, which arrives right on schedule on March 14 at 2:15 a.m., but also a total lunar eclipse, which begins on March 13th at 11:57 p.m. and becomes total at 2:26 a.m. on March 14th. And in case that isn’t quite enough, it will be significantly warmer and a little bit sunnier. Look for some snowdrops popping up through the ice and snow.