Today Is...The Ides Of March

I always assumed it was Caesar who mentioned the ides of March but it was Shakespeare putting words into his mouth in his tragedy Julius Caesar.
Caesar was really warned to 'beware the Ides of March' which is the middle of March and Caesar was killed by his own Senators on March 15th so pretty accurate.
You don’t become a Roman dictator without at least some people wanting you dead and Caesar knew that enemies were plotting his overthrow and it was a soothsayer who actually said it, telling Caesar to beware the middle of the month so it was only really him who needed to beware those mid-month days, the rest of us are fine.
According to the writings of philosopher Plutarch, a soothsayer warned Caesar to be on his guard months before the assassination and on the day he was due to become an ex-Emperor, Caesar sought out the same soothsayer and told him: 'The Ides of March be come'.
'So be they,' the soothsayer responded, 'but yet are they not past' but that would make for a long play so Shakespeare condensed it and had him shrugging off the warning and going ahead with the Senate meeting where 40 of his Senators, fed up with his tyrannical behaviour, decided to do something about him and grabbed him and pulled down his Toga.
If that never got the point across that they were not best pleased with their Emperor, the fact that the follow up action was for forty of them to stick knives into his naked body definitely did.