Julius Caesar is dead.
Sorry if that spoiled the news for you, but honestly, how could you not be up to date on this information? And no, not the salad – this Caesar came with considerably more knives.
And I know what you’re thinking: Why is this relevant? The old dictator is merely a pile of dust by now, and the worms have long since ravaged his body. But the 23 stab wounds that took him out hold meaning – bad luck.
Caesar died on March 15th, 44 BCE. But that isn’t just any day, it’s the Ides of March. Originally, the date was meant to mark the midway point of the month on the Roman calendar, but it’s now regarded as a time of bad luck.
“Beware the Ides of March,” Soothsayer said in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. And since then, history has clearly taken the hint that Caesar didn’t.
Caesar might have died, but the bad luck lives on.
Proceed At Your Own Risk: Enter Cats
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your paws. Not only have so many devastating events taken place on the Ides of March, but some humorous ones have also occurred. In fact, Caesar would be rolling in his grave if he knew of the cat-astrophe that had fallen over the site of his death. Why the cat pun? Well, because that’s just it… cats!
The site of Julius Caesar’s death, the Largo di Torre Argentina, located in Rome, Italy, is now home to a cat sanctuary. 130 cats – trust me, this is fur-real. Cat got your tongue yet? Just wait, there’s more.
You won’t believe it, but there’s litter-ally a group of ladies called the gattare that volunteer their time to care for the feline inhabitants. The cats are surprisingly friendly for being labeled as feral by many tourists, and that has quickly made the location a popular travel destination.
It’s ironic that such an intriguing location has popped up on the ruins of a brutal assassination, one of a renowned feline hater. Although it’s not proven, Caesar was rumored to have an irrational fear of cats. Sounds like a damaged ego to me. Purr-chance, he stumbled upon a black cat in his youth, one of the many obvious warning signs to his untimely demise.
It seems his legacy and the bad luck on the Ides of March is just another one of the cautionary tails to go down in the hiss-tory books.
Previously, on the Ides of March: beloved dictator Julius Caesar kicked the bucket, cats took over, and this Sunday is expected to be riddled with bad luck.
The moral of the story still remains: Beware the Ides of March.
