March 15: Power Changes Hands
“Beware the Ides of March” is advice Rome gave the world, and the world has spent two thousand years testing whether it applies only to the original recipient. The evidence is mixed. March 15 has not always been violent. But it has, with some regularity, been the day someone discovers that the position they thought they held has already been vacated.
On March 15, 44 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar arrived at the Theatre of Pompey for a meeting of the Senate and was stabbed twenty-three times by a group of senators who believed they were saving the republic. He was 55 years old and had been appointed dictator perpetuo — dictator in perpetuity — roughly a month earlier. The conspirators, led by Brutus and Cassius, had convinced themselves that removing Caesar would restore the Senate to its constitutional authority and return Rome to the oligarchic balance that had governed it for centuries.
They were wrong about almost everything. The republic had not functioned as a republic for decades. The Senate had not governed; it had negotiated between strongmen. Caesar’s death did not restore equilibrium. It opened a seventeen-year civil war that ended with his great-nephew Octavian consolidating more absolute power than Caesar had ever possessed, renaming himself Augustus, and becoming the first emperor of Rome. The assassins had killed the man and made the institution permanent.
Caesar died on a folding chair. The official account says he pulled his toga over his face as the blows landed, preserving his dignity in the last seconds he had available to exercise it. Whether that is true or simply the kind of story that attaches itself to a death that needs to mean something, it has traveled with the date ever since.
Nineteen hundred and seventy-three years later, on March 15, 1917, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia abdicated the throne. He had not intended to abdicate. He had spent the previous month attempting to suppress strikes and demonstrations in Petrograd by moving troops into the city, only to find that the troops were joining the demonstrators. When his advisors told him that abdication was the only way to prevent a complete collapse of the imperial order, he signed the documents and added a note asking that Russia continue the war against Germany. Russia did not continue the war. The provisional government that replaced him did not survive the year. By October, the Bolsheviks had taken power. Nicholas and his family were executed in a basement in Yekaterinburg the following July.
The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for 304 years. It ended in a railway carriage at Pskov, with a pen on a piece of paper, in a matter of minutes.
Sixty-eight years after Nicholas signed his abdication, on March 15, 1985, a computer at the Symbolics Corporation in Massachusetts was assigned the internet address symbolics.com, making it the first .com domain ever registered. The internet at that point was a research network used primarily by universities and defense contractors. Symbolics built LISP-based workstations for academic computing. No one at the company understood what they had been handed. The domain changed hands over subsequent decades, was eventually acquired by a domain investor, and today serves primarily as a historical artifact — a museum exhibit in the form of a URL.
The .com suffix that followed has become the most valuable piece of real estate in human commercial history, generated trillions of dollars in market capitalization, and reshaped every industry on earth. Symbolics.com got there first by accident.
March 15, then: the day Caesar’s assassins learned what power actually was. The day a tsar discovered that a dynasty is not the same thing as authority. The day the internet quietly planted its first commercial flag without anyone noticing.
The Ides do not always draw blood. Sometimes they just change the locks.