Cats of the Forum Romanum

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'.