Hurrah the Ides of March
Today marks StandPoint’s thirteenth year in business, and we couldn’t be more grateful and hopeful, even if the date itself is laced with ominous overtones. March 15, the Ides of March, is supposed to be bad luck and portend disaster, characteristics with which no new enterprise would want to associate. But at StandPoint, we’re proud that our success story began on this gloomy date. The Ides of March earned its bad reputation because of some very powerful and purposeful storytelling, a practice fundamental to our success as a public affairs and communications firm—although we are in the business of good reputations, not bad ones. The way in which the fate of Gaius Julius Caesar (the man whose bad fortune is forever linked with this date) became embedded in our culture is emblematic of compelling storytelling, and a great story in itself.
One key to great storytelling is a compelling truth, and it’s true that things didn’t go well for Caesar as he walked to work on this day in 44 BCE. But that was a long time ago and one would think that the story of his assassination would have been overtaken by the news cycles of the last 750,000 days. And yet the Ides are considered a bad omen to this day.
This wasn’t always so. The term Ides once signified nothing more the first full moon of any given month, usually between the 13th and 15th. But the Ides of March have always signified something more. Before Caesar reformed the calendar, the Roman new year began in March, with celebrations to welcome the approach of Spring. Caesar messed all this up by moving the new year to January 1 in 45 BCE, just one year before the Senate decided they really didn’t want him around any longer. The manner by which a group of senators told him this, by stabbing him to death, is the central act of a powerful story. After Greek and Roman learning re-emerged in Italy during the Renaissance, it’s not surprising that Caesar’s story would be well known among historians and academics.
But the fact that everyone reading this knows his name is largely due to a master of storytelling, social commentary, and popular culture—William Shakespeare. It was Shakespeare who built Caesar’s brand in the popular imagination. The power of his memory resonates even today. Into the 20th Century, his family name was still a generic term for “emperor” and provided imperial titles in both German (Kaiser) and Russian (Tsar). Caesar is the Kleenex of emperors. He even has his own salad dressing. Just as he raised Caesar’s profile, Shakespeare also permanently darkened the reputation of this day with his admonition to “beware the Ides of March.”
The plot of Shakespeare’s play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar includes the events leading to his assassination and the civil war which followed it. The Bard wrote this play near the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, at a time when concerns about the power of the monarchy overwhelming Parliament were growing. And since Elizabeth lacked an heir to her throne, worries about a new civil war tearing the country apart on her death were common. Political censorship of the time would have prevented Shakespeare from exploring these ideas openly.
But in the story of Caesar, he had ready to hand an example of both the dissolution of republican government into an imperial dictatorship and a stark warning about civil war. Contemporary audiences would surely have recognized his commentary on current events. Because he was a peerless storyteller, the ideas in Julius Caesar, including his caution to “beware the Ides of March,” linger to this day. As Malcolm Gladwell put it some 400 years later, some ideas are made to stick.
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