The Ides of March are upon us

[conuly]

All the livelong day
The Ides of March are upon us
We cannot get away
Do not think you can escape them
At home, or anywhere else
The Ides of March are upon us
Till somebody gets stabbed!

Back in the 8th grade, we did Julius Caesar. When our teacher asked why Caesar got stabbed, I said it was his destiny and he should have paid more heed to omens and mad soothsayers. Apparently, it wasn't an open-ended question, and also, that woman had no sense of humor. I maintain that my answer was perfectly valid.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It WAS a perfectly valid answer, and I bet most of the Romans of the time would have agreed.

Latin is a dead language,
It's very plain to see -
It killed off all the Romans
And now it's killing me!

"Lingua mortua sola lingua bona est."

[conuly]

Not only the Romans would have agreed, the people watching the play would have too! But no, I got a lecture on foreshadowing and hubris and blah blah blah, and this from a woman who wanted me to participate more in class.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Aha, so you were doing the play Julius Caesar, in English class, not History class - I didn't grok that at first. That makes your answer totally valid, because in that case the question isn't why the real Caesar really got stabbed, but why Shakespeare's character got stabbed in the play.

Sure, it was foreshadowing that the soothsayer warns him, and hubris that he ignored the warning, but c'mon - in a play about a historical event, the ending IS destined; Caesar the character gets stabbed because the real Caesar got stabbed.

Supposedly, the real Caesar got stabbed because he ignored all the signs and warnings that the Senate was going to do him in for threatening their patrician power-structure, but I'd bet that's not strictly true. Rome was full of soothsayers, official and unofficial, probably all contradicting each other, and anyway Julius must have known that many of the Senate wanted him dead. If they hadn't gotten him on the Ides of March, they'd have gotten him another time, so heeding the mad soothsayer would only have delayed his assassination, not prevented it.

[conuly]

LOL! Yes, I should have been more clear. My history education in middle school can be summed up with one word: American!

(And each year we started with Columbus, to boot. It's amazing, but 8th grade the teacher made a huge push and finally got us past the First World War. Good for her.)

If they hadn't gotten him on the Ides of March, they'd have gotten him another time, so heeding the mad soothsayer would only have delayed his assassination, not prevented it.

Undoubtedly. And even if he skipped town and changed his hairstyle and affected a pronounced accent, he'd still be dead by now anyway, unless there's more to him than we ever learned in ANY class!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well, he was declared a god (http://www.unrv.com/fall-republic/caesar-the-god.php), which he would not have been if he'd skipped town, so no doubt he would have chosen to remain Caesar regardless of how soon he was to meet his mortal death.

[conuly]

If he had been willing to do that, he would've been a different person.