Remember those annoying TIMED ESSAYS? Last week was the IDES of MARCH. See if you remember what happened to Caesar.

Julius Caesar Timed Essay

Prompt: This timed test will have you identifying the themes, ambition, and conflict, found in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. Give examples in dialogue and action of these characteristics found in all three men: Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. You have seventy minutes.

Hey, Jealousy!
by
Anne Teak

A few of Caesar’s friends start to find him annoying, but really it boils down to being jealous of him. The play, Julius Caesar by Edward Shakespeare, takes place a very long time ago in Rome, Italy, where you see all those partially crushed columns, sculptures with their heads, arms, or hands broken off, and stadiums that are crumbling more each day like in those gladiator movies where the young men wear a loincloth to cover their private parts, but show their muscular, no-haired (thank goodness, because hairy chests are gross!) bare chests, and six-pack abs, yet the older men wear robes that they call togas which I first learned about in the movie Animal House during their toga party scene. Both young and old alike wear sandals with straps going up their legs that help to hold the sandal in place because they really didn’t measure your foot back then and just sold or made you sandals that were close in size for you to wear. That’s why there was a need for leather straps to hold the open toe sandal in place on your foot so it wouldn’t come loose and cause you stub your toe, because that would really hurt.

But Caesar is going to get hurt anyway.

He didn’t get hurt during the war. He came home unharmed from that. It’s when he returns home a hero that his friends turned on him. But he was also so full of himself about his triumphs at war that he did not heed the warning signs. Well, there were really no visual signs. He should have paid attention to a stranger in Rome who told him to “Beware the Ides of March.” The Ides of March is March 15th. Ides means a day falling roughly in the middle of each month. Sometimes the middle of a month might be the thirteenth, so it is not always on the fifteenth of every month like in March.

I always associated that date bringing bad luck, and then one turns right around and on March 17th it’s a good luck day because of it being St. Patrick’s Day, which is a happy time with happy leprechauns dancing in the streets at a St. Patrick’s Day Parade like in Dublin, Georgia or Savannah. Everyone is wearing Kelly green – and not the green of envy, either – and most people at the parades are happy because they are smashed from green beer and wearing strings of beads and sparkly top hats and carrying four-leaf clovers for good luck, so maybe that is the reason there is even a St. Patrick’s Day at all: something to finally have people feel good about something around that time of month especially after the downer of Caesar being stabbed by his own friends.

Our teacher told us we have twenty minutes left.

I really know St. Patrick’s Day is about the saint, Patrick, who ministered Christianity in Ireland during the fifth century, but why did they choose March 17th?

Caesar was caught up in his own hype and his friends, Cassius and Brutus become concerned and jealous. Really, it was Cassius more than Brutus. But Brutus hangs around to see how the revenge they plan will play out. Caesar is so full of himself, he doesn’t even listen to his wife, Calpurnia, when she tells him about a dream, well I’d say nightmare, she had about his being murdered in town and begs him not to go. So, arrogant Caesar has had two warnings about the Ides of March, but he goes anyway and is a dead man walking.

Ambition and conflict blind all three men, so…

Teacher says ten minutes left…

I have to hurry and tell the best parts where Brutus ends up stabbing Caesar as the last of all the conspirators and it becomes the final blow that kills him but before he dies, Caesar says, “Et tu, Brute” which is Latin. They all spoke Latin back then. And I don’t see how that is even a language given it doesn’t even have all the letters of our alphabet in their Greek Alphabet. Our alphabet has twenty-six letters and Greek/Latin has Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu, Nu, Xi, Omicron, Pi, Rho, Sigma, Tau, Upsilon, Phi, Chi, Psi, Omega. Which is only twenty-four letters. I know this because my older sister just pledged Tri-Delt at the University of Georgia. She taught me all the Greek letters and the song that goes with it.

And then there’s the quote, “Great Caesar’s Ghost!”, which…

TIME!