Latin GCSE Omens and Julius Caesar

Caesar ignores omens warning that he would be assassinated.

In the days just before his death, he learned that a herd of horses, which he had dedicated on crossing the Rubicon river and let go free without a herdsman, were refusing to graze and weeping copiously. And Spurinna the soothsayer warned him as he was sacrificing that he should beware of a danger which would not be delayed beyond the Ides of March.

The day before those same Ides, indeed, birds of a different kind out of a nearby grove persued a king bird as it was entering the senate house of Pompey with a sprig of laurel, and in that same place tore it to pieces.

In fact, that night, when the day of the murder began to dawn, he seemed to himself in his sleep sometimes to fly above the clouds, and at other times to shake hands with Jupiter; and his wife Culpurnia dreamed that the gable of their house collapsed and that her husband was stabbed in her arms; and suddenly the door of her bedroom opened of its own accord.

Because of these things and at the same time because of his poor health, he hesitated for a long time whether to stay at home and put off the things he had proposed in the senate, but at last when Decimus Brutus urged him not to let down the people who were attending in large numbers and now waiting for a long time, he went out at almost the fifth hour, and when a paper summarising the conspiracy was offered by someone who met him on the way, he put it in with the other papers which he was holding in his left hand, as if he would read it soon.

Then, when many victims had been sacrificed, when he was unable to obtain favourable omens, he went into the senate house, making light of the ritual, mocking Spurinna and showing him up as a false seer, because the Ides of March had arrived without any harm coming to him: although he (Spurinna) said that they had indeed come, but not gone.

(after death)

At the first games that Augustus put on for him (Caesar) as a god, a comet shone for seven days in a row, rising at about the eleventh hour, and it was believed that it was the soul of Caesar having been taken into heaven; and for this reason a star was added to the top of his statue's head.