The Ides of March is Brilliant Satire on Classical Past

This is the first edition of The Ides of March published by Harper & Brothers (now Harper Collins) in 1948.

Fanny Butcher’s original review of The Ides of March appeared in The Chicago Tribune on February 22, 1948.

In The Ides of March Thornton Wilder has, as he has always done in his writing, combined wide classical knowledge with true creative experimentation. Only those who are masters of the rules, down to their minutest details, can manipulate those rules creatively — that is, to create a new pattern of rules.

Just as Thornton Wilder gave to creative philosophic novel writing a new pattern in his The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a new pattern to one-act plays in his The Long Christmas Dinner, and a new pattern to American folk drama in Our Town, he gives in The Ides of March a new pattern to the historical novel.

The Ides of March has as background the six months which preceded the fatal Ides of March, 44 B.C. "Historical reconstruction is not among the primary aims of this work. It may be called a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic," declares Mr. Wilder in a foreword. But his labeling of the novel as a "suppositional reconstruction" does not convince the reader that it is a fantasia, for never has a historical novel been written which gives the reader a more convincing sense of reality. Its technique immediately convinces him that fact, and fact only, is passing before his eyes, for the entire book is made up of contemporary recordings, mostly in letters or journals, occasionally in official documents, sometimes of quotations from historians of a generation or so later. Known historic fact and records are so commingled with what Mr. Wilder calls "fantasia" that only another deep classical scholar could untangle them. Mr. Wilder has a brilliant and an irresistibly convincing technique for historical novel writing, for it presents both authority and intimacy, and there is a strange excitement in their shared aegis.