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In the Roman calendar, the Ides of March fell on the 15th day of the Roman month of Martius. The word ides comes from a Latin word that means "to divide": The ides were simply the middle of the month. The date is famous because Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC. Because of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and its line “Beware the Ides of March”, the Ides of March has had a sense of doom. But in Roman times the Ides of March was simply the normal way of referring to March 15. Although the Roman calendar was eventually displaced by the modern days of the week around the 3rd century, the Ides continued to be used in a vernacular sense for centuries afterwards. When Shakespeare wrote the famous line "Beware the Ides of March!" in his play Julius Caesar in 1599, he did so in the reasonable assumption that his audience would know the date of Caesar's death and so have a good idea of what the Ides were.
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