Why Are We Still Killing Caesar?

If you go on social media today, you might see history articles or memes about a very special holiday: the murder of Julius Caesar. It might be a bottle of salad dressing with a knife in it or a pencil holder of a classical Roman bust, but you’ve definitely seen at least one reference to the anniversary. 

On March 15th 44 BC, Roman dictator Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times by members of the Senate. This date, also called the Ides of March, has become one of the most famous dates in history. Caesar’s death has been immortalized in artworks, one of Shakespeare’s histories, and in the popular imagination. 

But why did this one assassination become a meme over 2,000 years later? Why are we still killing Caesar? 

Probably because people have been “meme-ing” the Ides of March from the very beginning. Okay, well, not exactly the modern definition of a meme. But there was something definitely petty and un-serious about how the ancient Romans dealt with Caesar’s death. According to Plutarch in Lives: Life of Brutus 5, Brutus was influenced by political graffiti urging him to kill Caesar with quotes such as “Brutus, are you sleeping?”, though this is likely a myth.

Then another account from over 150 years later, Suetonius’, Lives of the Twelve Caesars: Julius Caesar 80-82 written in 121 BCE retells the story yet again, this time having Caesar ignore the warning on a tablet in the tomb of Capys: “Whenever the bones of Capys shall be moved, it will come to pass that a son of Ilium shall be slain at the hands of his kindred, and presently avenged at heavy cost to Italy” – an event that is totally real because “Cornelius Balbus, an intimate friend of Caesar” vouched for it.

One thing we do know for sure is that a commemorative coin was made to celebrate the assassination, a silver denarius with Brutus’s face on one side and a cap with two daggers on the other. It’s stamped with EID MAR, which stands for the Ides of March. 

What this shows us is that people have been talking about and exaggerating Caesar’s death since the day Caesar died. Even well into Elizabethan England when Shakespeare wrote his own version of the story (which once again has Caesar ignoring obvious and ominous signs of his own demise. Seriously, you’d think the guy had never heard a cautionary tale before). In the 1700 and 1800s, dozens of depictions were created of the dictator’s death. In the 1900s Caesar first appeared on screen in Cleopatra in 1917 and made his way to the end of the century when Xena: Warrior Princess gave Brutus the idea to kill Caesar in 1999. 

But what does an ancient Roman coin and a silent film have to do with memes? Well, everything. 

The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene to describe gene-like infectious units of culture that spread from person to person. Memes aren’t always jokes or absurd images repeated on the internet. Memes are ideas that are spread like a virus through peoples, places, and time. 

That’s all to say that killing Caesar might be in our DNA. Since the very beginning humans have been talking about the dictator’s death and spinning it into wild tales, cultural references, and jokes. 

Now, in 2026, these jokes may be needed more than ever. As political tensions rise, remembering history may help us make better decisions in the future when it comes to dealing with dictatorships or evil bosses in our own lives. Maybe it won’t resort to a mutinous stabbing, but it is important for us to remember that power comes from numbers. 

Let’s face it, memes are just a part of who we are. Sometimes they are a cultural tradition we carry from thousands of years ago and sometimes they help us blow off some steam. So, in the wise words of Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls (2004): “We should totally just stab Caesar!”

Author: Abby Kirby

Abby Kirby is an English teacher and fan studies scholar. She holds an M.A. in Media and Cinema Communications from DePaul University.

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