There
were strange lights in the sky in the early
hours
of fifteenth of March, 44BC,
flashes
of crimson, hues of blues and yellows,
they
had been seen before, when Rome was the prey.
The
temple cats stirred and became restless
looking
upwards then quickly darting down
to
vanish beneath the sacred buildings,
hierarchies
and animosities forgotten.
In
the chill of morning they watched the sixty
senators
stride past led by Brutus and
Cassius.
The black tom, known as Magnus
Lux, the Great Light, was heard to remark
'Yon
Cassius, hear his slack bones clack,
methinks
he needs a good feed and fuck.' The cats
of
Rome, like the plebeians, were known for their
vulgarity.
They watched as Julius Caesar passed
and
heard his taunt to Spurinna the Haruspex
that
'The Ides of March are come.' The Haruspex,
a
seer in entrails, had divined danger for Caesar
and
so replied 'Aye Caesar, but not gone...'
The
cats, a clowder of mewling and yowling
orphans,
a ragbag of feline protestation
sensing
assassination in the ribbed
and
clacking air, followed the gathering
'By
the bollocks of Jupiter' said Magnus Lux
'This
day will be marked in metal and bone.'
And
when Brutus thrust his weapon up high
into
his father to forge one of the
twenty
seven wounds, to ensure he would
not
rise again, the general and god had spat
with
blood 'And you child?' And so the deed
was
surely done and gods, and cats, all slinked away.
In
the ensuing centuries the cats witnessed
the
wars and fires, the murderous retributions,
the
excesses, and secret assignations;
the
screech and the scream of metal on bone,
all
of the triumphs and trials, processions
and
condemnations, the memorials, the shrines
the
arches and the grandeur. More strange lights,
the raw vermilion of war, and the cats
cowered
among smokey ruins. Roman gods
were
thus deposed and history rewritten.
Yeshua,
a Jewish mystic who was
executed
by the state became the god
Jesu
Christus, and the masonry of
forum
temples was used to build churches
in
his honour. The twelve guilded deities
of
the forum and the myriad minor gods
were
replaced by statues of apostles,
angels
and saints. Some said Yeshua
would
awake in horror at his deification
and
return to cast the new temples asunder.
But
they were put to death for heresy.
Magnus
Lux remarked that 'the new boss
smells
like the old boss.' And the temple cats
slinked
around and slept among the ruins.
They
lived those millennia being fed
each
day by the Gattara, a Crazy Cat
Lady,
dressed in black and murmuring
in
Latin, of news and scandals of papacy
and
politics and the curse of inhumanity,
how
the paupers had become princes
how
the princes had become corrupt
and
how nothing changes through the ages.
And
how the rule of power and corruption
has
persisted from age to age. And the black tom
Magnus
Lux would reply 'Carpe noctem'
that
'We cats will always seize the night'.
