You're listening to the skeptics guide to the universe. Your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the skeptics guide to the universe. Today is Tuesday, March 11th, 2014, and this is your host, Steven Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Rebecca Watson. Hello everyone.

Jane Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Hi everybody.

Hola, qué tal? What's going on? Evil. Evil is a foot. What happened now? I thought it was more of a hand.

Someone switched this thing to evil. Beware. Beware the eyes of March. That's today. March 15th already.

It is. And you know what happens? Every March 15th, bad stuff. I mean, ever since 44 BC, I guess.

Zombification maybe. Yeah, the zombie of Julius Caesar rises from the dead once a year to roam the earth.

And he distributes candy to all the kids.

Disgusting candy though. It's like chocolate covered door mice, mostly.

You know, the eyes of March is one of those things that I heard about like for the vast majority of my life and never really knew what it meant until about, you know, maybe five years ago.

That's truly people to the DJ. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I just did have to read Julius Caesar in high school.

I probably didn't forgot it. And you know, who knows?

I loved it. I don't know why, but I loved it so much that the year that we had to read Julius Caesar, I played Mark Antney in a stage production.

Oh wow. So yeah, the eyes of March are best known.

Well, so first of all, eyes just refers to basically the middle of the month.

That's how the Romans referred to the middle of the month. March is currently our first month or our third month.

But to the Romans, it was the first month of their year. And so the eyes of March were generally like new years sort of holidays where they would sacrifice animals and I don't know, get drunk.

Whatever you do until 44 BC when a group of senators assassinated Julius Caesar, they gathered around him and stabbed him to death basically.

What about Brutus? Brutus was one of them.

Oh, it's too brutal. He didn't necessarily say that, but it was popularly known that he had said that by the time Shakespeare wrote his play.

So Shakespeare included that line, but they don't really know what his last words were. Some people said he didn't say much of anything except for like, yeah.

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