John DiBello returns with a lesson you never got in history or literature class! — UPDATED 3/15/26: Beware the Ides of March! No, really, beware! Because you really don’t know what could happen! Ach, OK. Maybe it’s not that serious. Maybe it’s just time to check out John DiBello’s hilarious piece that first ran back in 2015. Because, y’know, it’s timeless. Just like the story of Julius Caesar. Dig it. — Dan — By JOHN DiBELLO Beware the Ides of March! To which mighty Julius Caesar, Grand Poo-Bah of the Holy Roman Empire, asked: “What, by Jupiter, is an Ide?” Answer: it’s the middle of the month, or more specifically, March 15th — the day that Caesar got stabbed in the senate. Which, I think we can all agree, is a very painful place to be stabbed. You could read about the life of Julius and his emperorin’ family in Suetonius’ classic Roman history text The Twelve Caesars, but why settle for merely twelve when 13th Dimension can give you a baker’s dozen of Caesars? So in honor of the I. of M., let’s pop in on Julie ‘n’ pals through the noblest medium of them all: comic books! — 1. Live from Caesar’s Palace (Classics Illustrated) You can get a fairly straightforward view of historical Caesar in comics books written by William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon himself, before he broke his contract with a young Stan Lee and headed to work on the legitimate stage. Classics Illustrated presented several popular Shakespeare plays in easy-to-swallow comic form, including that great tragedy of Roman times, Julius Caesar. The play itself infamously features a clock ringing the hour, hundreds of years before the invention of true mechanical timepieces. After spotting this error, so many readers wrote into the Classics Illustrated office demanding a No-Prize that the company eventually went out of business in 1971 for completely unrelated reasons. Another Classics Illustrated issue, Caesar’s Conquests, was based on the memoirs of Julius himself and featured his military victories over much of Europe, a campaign of which many players of the board game Risk would be envious. Julius Caesar himself is to be commended for his exceptional foresight in making certain his book contract had a comics adaptation clause. To this day his descendants, Bob and Sylvia Caesar of Fort Wayne, Indiana,...