What Are The Ides of March?

While Kalends, Nones and Ides were ancient markers used to reference dates in relation to the phases of the moon, it’s unlikely even Shakespeare could have predicted how his famous phrase:

“Beware the Ides of March.”

Shakespeare

would become synonymous with bad luck over the course of history.

When Is The Ides of March?

Falling on March 15th of each year, the Ides of March bad luck streak began in 44 BCE, when conspirators led by Marcus Junius Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar to death before a horrified Roman senate.

Next came the French raid on Southern England in 1360, when invaders raped, pillaged and murdered their way across the English landscape. In 1889, an Ides of March cyclone wrecked six warships at Apia, Samoa—three German and three American—taking the lives of 200 sailors, while on March 15th, 1917 Russian Czar Nicholas the Second Abdicated his throne.

The string of bad luck continued on March 15th, 1939, when Nazi troops seized the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, effectively wiping Czechoslovakia off the map. On March 15th, 1941, a Saturday-night blizzard—the most severe in modern history—struck the northern Great Plains, leaving at least 71 people dead in North Dakota and Minnesota, with an additional six fatalities in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

The Ides of March for 1952 saw the most rainfall ever recorded in a 24-hour period—a whopping 73.62 inches on the Indian Ocean island of La Réunion—127 and a half inches over a three-day period—while on March 15th, 1971, the Ed Sullivan Show canceled after 23 years on the air, causing a generation of Americans to mourn.

In more recent times, on March 15th, 1988, NASA reported that the ozone layer over the Northern Hemisphere had depleted three times faster than previously predicted, while on March 15th, 2003, after accumulating reports of a mysterious respiratory disease afflicting patients in Asia and Canada, the World Health Organization issued a heightened global health alert for the SARS virus, or Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome, making the ides of March, one of the deadliest days of the year.