March 15

The senators closed around him on the floor of the curia, and the most powerful man in the Roman world went down under their daggers, twenty-three wounds delivered by men who called themselves not murderers but liberators. Julius Caesar died on the Ides of March, 44 BC, and the date the Romans had marked as an ordinary religious observance — the Ides themselves, listed in every almanac of the year — became forever the name of a betrayal. Shakespeare gave it a soothsayer and a warning, “Beware the Ides of March,” and the warning stuck so thoroughly that the date now carries the assassination the way a scar carries the blade.

What the calendar is less eager to advertise is that it kept its promise twice. On March 15, 1921, on a quiet street in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, a 23-year-old Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian stepped behind Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire and the chief architect of the Armenian genocide, and shot him dead in daylight. Tehlirian did not run. He stood over the body and, by his own account, did not consider himself a criminal. A German court, after hearing what Talaat had set in motion, acquitted him. Here was the Ides repeating its grammar across nineteen centuries: a powerful statesman, a sudden knife or its modern equivalent, and a killer convinced he was an instrument of justice rather than its violation.

The coincidence is almost too neat, and the date seems to know it. Caesar and Talaat were not private men cut down in private quarrels; they were the state itself, or had been, and their deaths posed the oldest political question — whether the mighty are ever truly beyond reach, and who gets to decide. It is a fitting date, then, for the births of figures who spent their lives inside the machinery of law and power. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, born March 15, 1933, made her name arguing that the law must bend toward the powerless. Andrew Jackson, born March 15, 1767, the seventh president, embodied power’s appetite for its own expansion. The date holds the lawgiver and the strongman in the same hand.

It holds quieter assertions of sovereignty too. Maine entered the Union as the twenty-third state on March 15, 1820. Iran nationalized its oil industry on March 15, 1951, wresting the country’s wealth from foreign control — another seizure of what the powerful had assumed was theirs. Read together, the entries make a single argument. Power on this date is never settled; it is taken, defended, and now and then violently revoked. The Ides of March is not merely a memory of one dead general. It is a standing reminder, refreshed across two thousand years, that no throne is so high the knife cannot find it.