Beware the Ides of March -- It's Coming

Friday the 13th gets all the horror movies, but beware, the Ides of March falls on a Monday this year!

Maybe you remember it from your required high school reading of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," where a soothsayer warned the Roman emperor to "beware the Ides of March." Fast forward to the 15th day of the third month in the Julian calendar, and the arrogant autocrat was dead -- murdered by a host of Roman senators, including his best buddy Brutus.

And the line "Et, tu, Brute?" was born to haunt traitors and high schoolers everywhere.

The ides concept originated as a way for the Romans to track the full moon. Usually falling in the center of the month -- like the full moon - the word ides came from "idus," a Latin word for "divide." When the Romans later separated their calendar from the moon, the ides showed up on the 15th of any month with 31 days (at that time March, May, July and October), on the 13th of all other months.

Still, the ides have a bad reputation to uphold -- or fight off. And you don't have to be superstitious to buy in.

"People tend to give special significance to certain dates -- birthdays, anniversaries, leap years, Friday the 13^th, and so on," explains Benjamin Radford, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine. "That belief is similar to numerology, where people seek cosmic significance in numbers and dates, seeing them as good or bad, lucky or unlucky."

But does anyone really believe that March 15 is an unlucky day? Absolutely. Sixteen years ago, Susan Miller, a public relations firm owner from Anderson, Indiana and her husband brought their beautiful newborn daughter home from the hospital on March 15. "Within minutes of arriving, the peaceful, sleeping cherub we brought home from the hospital was transformed into a howling, red-faced terror that ruled with an iron rattle for the next year," Miller tells Holidash.

"My only awareness of March 15 prior to bringing home my daughter Chloe was Julius Caesar, which was required freshman reading circa 1979," Miller says. "The funny thing is, I had forgotten all about it until I had my own ides of March experience. I could've sworn I heard, "Et tu, Susan!"

She still says she's not superstitious, but the Miller family commemorates -- or rather commiserates -- each March 15. And they're happy to report that Chloe is now a "mostly peaceful soul."

There are things you can do, though, to ward off the inevitable bad luck. Jezebel ran a list of things to be aware of on the ides in 2009 that promises to "save each other from lesser dangers on this treacherous day" (including unfrosted Pop Tarts and "A date with anyone who has appeared on a VH1 Reality Show"). Or you could just keep your chin up.

"What can sometimes happen is that people will come to believe a date is "bad" or unlucky and will focus on anything that goes wrong on that day," Radford warns. "In that way, it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: You assume you're going to have a bad day, and so you do. But these things are all psychological, they all depend on your beliefs."

In other words, there's no scientific proof that March 15 is going to be bad, but there's power in positive thinking.

So if you're the type to throw caution to the wind, do what Marc Ross of McLean, Va. did. He got married on March 15, 2003, and he says he'll be celebrating "seven happy years" in 2010. If that's not a sure enough sign of luck -- how about this one: Ross says it's an easy date to remember, so he'll never forget an anniversary.