Wouldn’t it take a certain arrogance or pride to hold a party on the Ides of March?
Or, for that matter, to attend one?
Are we too busy to heed the signs? Too unaware of portentous omens? Too lacking in simple humility?
If this were a Greek tragedy, the gods would certainly punish such hubris:
-there’d be salmonella in the artichoke dip
-the keg would run flat…or worse yet, dry
-Jerry’s falsetto during “O, Danny Boy” would shatter our windshields
-the stage, at the end of Act V, would be littered with corpses
But, then again, it is the feast of St. Patrick,
And the Irish have been beating the odds for centuries.
They majored in tragedy, minored in hard knocks.
And as a wiser poet than I once said, “I’d walk a longish road, through drear, hard rain, and fog for a well-pulled pint.”
Who am I, a New England Jew, to argue?
Was it Yates? Or maybe Brendan Behan?
Either way, it was another scribe – a Brit – who coined for us “the Ides of March.”
I first read it in the tenth-grade English class of Mr. Wills,
Who, if the bathroom stall near the library was correct, “eats pills.”
In Act I, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, a Soothsayer – Yes, a Soothsayer; Rome was lousy with them in those days – cries, “Beware the Ides of March!”
He says it three times before exiting stage right, and we all know that bud luck runs in threes, like the number of leaves found on the much more common yet luck-less clover.
Caesar, stubborn as an Irish mule, pays no heed to the Soothsayer’s warnings.
But, this is high drama, and there are, to be sure, other signs.
Looking out on a tumultuous storm, here is Casca, a conspirator, talking to Cicero, a Senator, in Act I, Scene 3:
“Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.”
And, as if that’s not enough, here’s Calpurnia (Wife of Caesar) recounting her dream in Act II, Scene 2:
“Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar! these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them.”
So, let’s recount:
The heavens are raining fire and blood; ghosts and the undead are strolling about; Lions are whelping in the town square,
And what does Caesar do?
Ignores it all. He might just as well have gone to a St. Patrick’s Day party for all he cared for such superstitions.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once,” he smugly answers his spouse.
“Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
You can say that again. Sir Julius gets it in the back nine times at the start of Act III.
The moral, as my own Calpurnia would say: Always listen to the woman.
But here I stand, despite the Soothsayer’s prophesy, on the Ides of March.
What’s a Roman with an omen to do?
I could cite my Old Man, a voluntary poet in his own right, when he heard me practicing Marc Anthony’s soliloquy for Mr. Wills’ English class;
Quoth me Da: “He who drinks beer, Shakespeare.”
--Steve Hodin
