March funeral procession an annual tradition at Taunton High School

By GERRY TUOTI

Posted Mar 15, 2011 @ 10:56 PM

Taunton —

Rather than heeding the warning to beware the Ides of March, students at Taunton High School embrace the inauspicious date each year.

Shouting “Caesar mortuus est” or “Caesar is dead,” dozens of toga-clad members of the high school’s Latin Club paraded through the halls Tuesday morning to reenact the funeral procession of Julius Caesar. The slain Roman leader was stabbed to death 2,055 years ago Tuesday.

The annual tradition, which began nearly 50 years ago at Taunton High School, is the Latin Club’s primary activity each year.

“It’s a lot of fun, and I think the other kids in the school get a kick out of it,” said student Declan Lynch, co-president of the Latin Club.

For Lynch, fellow co-president Kelsey Kerkoff and the club’s other seniors, Monday was their last Ides of March reenactment as students.

“It’s a little bittersweet,” Kerkoff said. “I’m excited, but a little sad at the same time.”

Borrowing elements from history and the Shakespearean drama “Julius Caesar,” each student portrayed a character, such as Brutus, Marc Antony, Cleopatra and Pliny.

Freshman Derek Simpson, who sported a toga stained with theatrical blood, played Caesar. His job was to lie on a stretcher as two pallbearers in centurion armor carried him through the school.

The procession made several stops, where the reenactors gave brief theatrical performances to classmates and teachers who assembled in the hallways to observe the spectacle.

As he does every year, Latin teacher Chris Scully donned a toga to partake in the procession. He remembered doing the Ides of March procession years ago when he was a student at Taunton High.

“It was much smaller then,” he said. “The students now are responsible for the growth of the event.”
Invited guests Doug and Kathy Ryan also participated in the march. The husband-and-wife duo, both retired educators, belong to Historia Antiqua and visited Taunton High School to give a presentation on the Roman army.

Elizabeth Rodrigues, curriculum supervisor for the foreign languages department, said the Ides of March event is a perfect tie-in to National Foreign Language Week, which Taunton is currently celebrating. She credits a vibrant Latin program at the school with successfully carrying on the mid-March tradition.

“Just to have a school tradition is an important thing,” she said. “This is one of the oldest at Taunton High. This is something everyone looks forward to.”

Contact Gerry Tuoti at gtuoti@tauntongazette.com.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

We Come To Bury Caesar, Not to Praise Him

The bloody end of Julius Caesar forever darkened the Ides of March.

Brian Handwerk

for National Geographic News

Updated March 15, 2011

Caesar: The ides of March are come.
Soothsayer: Aye, Caesar, but not gone.
—Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 1

Thanks to Shakespeare's indelible dramatization, March 15—also called the Ides of March—is forever linked with the 44 B.C. assassination of Julius Caesar, and with prophecies of doom.
"That line of the soothsayer, 'Beware the ides of March,' is a pithy line, and people remember it, even if they don't know why," said Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference at Washington, D.C.'s Folger Shakespeare Library.

Until that day Julius Caesar ruled Rome. The traditional Republican government had been supplanted by a temporary dictatorship, one that Caesar very much wished to make permanent.
But Caesar's quest for power spawned a conspiracy to have him killed, and on the Ides of March, a group of prominent Romans brought him to an untimely end in the Senate House.

It Wasn't Just Caesar Who Paid the Price on Ides of March
Aside from its historical connection, the concept of the Ides of March would have resonated with English citizens in 1599, the year Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar was probably performed, Ziegler said.
"This whole business of the Ides of March and timekeeping in the play would have had a strong impact on audiences," she said.

"They were really struck by the differences between their Julian calendar [a revision of the Roman calendar created by Caesar] and the Gregorian calendar kept in Catholic countries on the continent."
Because the two calendars featured years of slightly different lengths, they had diverged significantly by the late 16th century and were several days apart.
(Related: "Leap Year: How the World Makes Up for Lost Time.")

In Roman times the Ides of March was mostly notable as a deadline for settling debts.
That calendar featured ides on the 15th in March, May, July, and October or on the 13th in the other months. The word's Latin roots mean "divide," and the date sought to split the month, originally at the rise of the full moon.

But because calendar months and the lunar cycle are slightly out of sync, this connection was soon lost.

Ides of March Assassins: Heroes or Murderers?

The Ides of March took on special significance after Caesar's assassination—but observance of the anniversary at the time varied among Roman citizens.

"How they felt depended on their political position," said Philip Freeman, a classicist at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and the author of Julius Caesar.

"Some were thrilled that Caesar had died, and some were horrified," he said.

The debate about Caesar's fate has extended through the ages and was taken up by some major literary figures. In Dante's Inferno, for example, Caesar is in Limbo, a relatively pleasant place in hell reserved for virtuous non-Christians.

"But Brutus [one of the leaders of the assassination] is down in the very center of hell with Judas, being munched on by Satan—it's about as bad as you can get," Freeman said.

The Folger library's Ziegler thinks the Bard had a more balanced view.

"I think Shakespeare shows both of them as being humans with their own weaknesses and strong points," she said.

Whether they were heroes or murderers, the real-life Ides of March assassins were subjected to less than pleasant outcomes.

"Within a couple of years Brutus and [fellow assassin] Cassius were dead," Freeman noted.

"They were not able to bring back the Republic, and really what they did was usher in more of a permanent dictatorship under the future Roman emperors—the opposite of what they intended."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110315-ides-of-march-2011-facts-beware-caesar-what-when/