Beware the Ides of March
What does the month of July, an unnatural way to give birth, a yummy cheesy salad, and a Kaiser roll all have in common? They are all named after history's most famous dictator, Julius Caesar.
March 15 (the Ides, the middle of a month) marks the 1,963rd anniversary of Caesar's fabled assassination in the portico of the Theater of Pompey in Rome. Being stabbed 23 times by rivals within the standing political structure would commonly lead to the trivialization of any leader's accomplishments, yet Caesar's legacy was forever entrenched within the Western Tradition when his successor and adopted son Octavian (known as Augustus Caesar) transformed the mighty Roman Republic by becoming its first emperor.
While many have been taught that Caesar's assassination was the result of a group of liberal conspirators combating an ambitious leader's declaration of dictatorship, current studies speculate that Caesar had actually manipulated his political enemies by driving them to want to kill him that fateful day. Why this extreme act of masochism you may ask? Because new evidence suggests that Caesar was slowly becoming debilitated by epilepsy. In a society where disabilities were condemned, Caesar knew that the only way to ensure his eternal fame was to be a martyr for his cause. He had planned for Rome's imperial future without him by grooming a young Octavian for the position he would later hold for forty-one years.
It seems to me that some individuals are so sly that their motives can be hidden from historians for millennia, while their legacies are concurrently lauded in texts and classrooms.