Beware the Ides of March, dear reader!  Today is March 15, also known as the Ides of March, a time to remember that your best friends, your closest confidantes, even your immediate family can and in all likelihood will betray you just when you need them the most.  Thus, it is a darkly significant day on the Gallaway calendar, and it should be on yours as well.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, and/or you weren’t an English major, allow me to elucidate while once again including you in my nightly prayers. Let’s set the scene: March 15, 44 BC, and Rome’s power-hungry Senate is a pressure cooker ready to explode. Julius Caesar—conqueror, dictator, and all-around larger-than-life legend—strides in, blissfully unaware of the betrayal brewing. A pack of senators, led by his so-called friend Brutus, decide it’s time for a regime change. In a flash, they turn the Senate floor into a crime scene, stabbing Caesar 23 times in a frenzy of blood, treachery, and ambition. Shakespeare immortalized this savage betrayal in Julius Caesar (1599), giving us the haunting line, “Et tu, Brute?” (“And (even) you, Brutus?”)—a gut-punch that echoes through time. The Ides of March became the ultimate symbol of backstabbing doom, inspiring literary giants from Dante to Robert Graves. Caesar’s epic rise and brutal fall lit a fire under centuries of writers, proving that the rawest dramas aren’t fiction, but the messy, bloody stuff of history.

If you have ever been betrayed by your entire personal cohort, you (should) know well the lessons of the Ides of March.  If you have not yet been devastated by betrayal by those closest to you…you need to pay special attention to this, because no matter how immune you think you and your life are from this sort of treachery, you are overdue, greatly increasing the likelihood that It Is Coming: someone close to you is plotting behind your back.

With that in mind, here are my 5 Tips to Avoid Betrayal This Ides of March:

1. Trust Sparingly If At All: Keep your inner circle tighter than a duck’s pucker and your trust even tighter than that. Caesar trusted Brutus, and look where that got him—23 stab wounds! Vet your allies like a Roman general sizing up a legion.
2. Limit Your Circle: The fewer associates, the fewer knives at your back. Logically, your circle will be more of a stick: a single person, if you must have that.  But as Kobayashi reminds us in The Usual Suspects: “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”  An absolute minimalist, fiercely loyal crew beats the hell out of a big, fickle crowd every time.
3. Stay Ruthless When Needed (And Ruthlessness Is Always Needed): Don’t hesitate to cut ties with anyone showing shifty eyes. Caesar’s leniency with his enemies was his downfall—show strength, not mercy, when the stakes are high.
4. Watch for Signs: Keep an ear to the ground. Whispers, odd alliances, or sudden flattery? Those are red flags. Caesar ignored the soothsayer’s warning—don’t make the same mistake!
5. Control the Narrative: Stay one step ahead by shaping what others know about you. If they can’t predict your moves, they can’t plot against them.

The key behind this seemingly paranoid strategy is surviving the betrayal because you were expecting it, as opposed to Ceasar, who only realized the extent of his betrayal as his best friend was sliding a knife fatally into his back, when it was far too late.

The Ides of March whisper a blood-soaked truth: “When you come for the king, you best not miss.”  Emerson said that in “Self-Reliance.”  The more popular, punchy version – “When you strike at a king, you must kill him” – comes from a 20th-century paraphrase of Emerson by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  Hesitate, flinch, or falter, and the crown doesn’t just endure – it crushes.  I’m sure Ceasar’s ghost would agree.  When the conspirators draw steel, but their trembling hands spare their empire’s tyrant a moment too long, what follows isn’t mercy – it is the king’s justice, a vengeful tide of retribution that will drown them all.

N.P.: “Auf die Zunge (feat. Schattenmann)” – Eisbrecher