I have only one regret, despite this cursed existence visited upon me for reasons and by means that pass my understanding. It has been, for me, five years and eight months thus far. The people now expect, though I see but a glimpse of them one day per year, a full four score years of life, or thereabouts. If such is granted also to me — or should I say, inflicted upon me — I have twelve thousand days remaining. As one day is, for me, a year, I fear I shall see wonders even exceeding what I have already witnessed.

Ah, but I promised my regret. It is only this: that I wrote, and wrote well — tragedies, satires, elegies — and had I thought upon the matter at the time, I would have expected that work to be my legacy. Alas, it is all lost, and I am barely remembered, and that for a single act that I only half participated in. As that act took place on the Ides, that being this very day, and the Ides being the day of my cursed imprisonment since, I have only the guess that in some way it is the source of my undoing.

I find it strange that I am singled out (if singled out I have been; perhaps all share a similar existence). For I was not the author of the plot. That was the the four: Marcus Brutus, Gaius Trebonius, Decimus Brutus Albinus, and Gaius Cassius Longinus. I did not strike first; that was Lucius Tillius Cimber. In truth, I did not strike at all. There were but 23 blows, but there were more than 30 of us. I knew of the plan, and approved of it, and was present, but did not strike. I had not the opportunity. So perhaps that is the source of my curse, that I did not take real action of my own but only agreed. Nevertheless, I made no secret of my presence that day, nor of my approval of the event. It was why Lucius Varus finally pursued me to Athens, where I had taken residence.

That final day was strange; the final moment stranger. Lucius Varus confronted me in private, declaring that I was the last of those who had attended the deed twelve years before. I agreed that I had attended, but argued that I did not strike. Varus cared not; he had his orders from Octavian and had sworn to carry them out. And so I readied myself for his onslaught — which never came. Somehow from that day I was transported to another, in the same house, the very same room — but the furnishings had shifted. In my confusion I rushed around to find someone to help me. I encountered a citizen I was not acquainted with, who nevertheless challenged me to explain my presence in his house. “Your house?” I said, “this is my house.”

We argued briefly until he asked who I might be that I believed the house to be mine. I answered that I was Gaius Cassius Parmensis, a not inconsiderable person. He immediately turned pale and leaned against the nearby wall. Taking note of his pallor, I rushed to his side to offer assistance. Our argument forgotten for the moment, I helped him to a chair, and we began to talk. That is how I learned that the day was, again, somehow the Ides. Nearly a full year after my interrupted encounter with Lucius Varus. I had been known in the city, of course, but not after Varus arrived, he who announced to all — quite loudly, as I recalled was his habit — that he had ended my life, and so to all who had participated in the death of Caesar years before.

“My life is clearly not at an end,” I protested after receiving this explanation. “Here I am, and see, I can lift this pomegranate, which no ghost could accomplish.” And yet as to where I had been hidden in the months between Varus’ visit and the current day, the Ides, I had no answer. No time at all had passed for me, even as months had elapsed in Athens. The new owner of the house — my house — gave me dinner, and bid me stay the night. I did, and yet the next day, everything was once again different. Finding yet a different resident to inquire of, I discovered that the day was the Ides. “Not true,” I protested, “that was yesterday, surely.” But it was true. And that was the initiation of my current existence; every night I retire on the Ides of March, and every morning I wake to the next Ides.

Everyone I knew, and everyone I knew of, is long dead. As is everything I knew. And, sadly, my work, which I had hoped would live on. But instead it seems to be I who must live on, from one Ides to the next, seeing only one day out of all the year. I learned of the fall of the Roman Empire, its place taken by the barbarian Kings of Italy, the first of whom was Odoacer. His fate, like Caesar’s, was to be slain. In this case by Theoderic, the King of a tribe called the Ostragoths. I knew nothing of this tribe, as the event itself happened nearly two years after the onset of my new condition. That is, it was for me only 500 days. Later that same year (for me), or in the year 856, the Byzantine Empire, which was, in a way, Rome of the East, gained a new emperor: Michael III. He overthrew his own mother, Theodora, to gain the throne. It speaks much about the fate of men that hundreds of days — which is to say years for all but I — after the glorious Republic of Rome in which I lived and worked, the world was again ruled by kings and emperors.

Another throne went vacant many days later — that would have been in the year 1917 for normal people — when the Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, abdicated and ended the Romanov dynasty. Ironic, at least to me, that the Russians took the name Caesar and made it “tsar”, and then the opposite event happened — Caesar had become a tyrant and thus we banded together to try to stop him, while in Russia the tyrant was already there, and the population banded together to end that tyranny — or perhaps trade one tyranny for another. Such is life, at least as it once was for me.

As the days passed for me, and I travelled in my strange fashion, having just one day per year, I began to learn about things entirely strange to me. Just a few days ago, since mankind had invented flying machines, a new transportation, “Philippine Airlines” began its service in a land I knew nothing of, using machines I can barely conceive even though I have now seen them.

I have vowed to attempt to record, in some fashion, my experiences in my staccato existence. Perhaps this new work will survive as my old writings have not. And I understand how old they now are; I have lived less than six years worth of days since Varus, but everything I knew is now vastly ancient, deep in the well of time. And yet perhaps a great deal more is yet to come. I will find out more on the next Ides of March.

So reads the account of one Gaius Cassius Parmensis of Rome. He was one of the conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BCE. The assassins were trying to stave off a dictatorship by Caesar and extend the Roman Republic, but the assassination turned out to accelerate the fall of the republic and the conversion of Rome into an Empire. The assassins were reportedly all hunted down later, and the story goes that Gaius Cassius Parmensis was the last to be found, twelve years later in Athens. History reports that Lucius Varus killed him on the orders of Octavius, who by then was the emperor. But maybe not…

Note to readers: Happened will be on hiatus for a few days, until Sunday, March 20. Let me know how you liked today’s weird little episode!