Caesar

Moreover, Caesar actually suspected him, so that he once said to his friends: What, think ye, doth Cassius want? I like him not over much, for he is much too pale. And again, we are told that when Antony and Dolabella were accused to him of plotting revolution, Caesar said: I am not much in fear of these fat, long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones, meaning Brutus and Cassius.

But destiny, it would seem, is not so much unexpected as it is unavoidable, since they say that amazing signs and apparitions were seen. Now, as for lights in the heavens, crashing sounds borne all about by night, and birds of omen coming down into the forum, it is perhaps not worth while to mention these precursors of so great an event;

but Strabo the philosopher says[*](Probably in the Historical Commentaries cited in the Lucullus, xxviii. 7.) that multitudes of men all on fire were seen rushing up, and a soldier’s slave threw from his hand a copious flame and seemed to the spectators to be burning, but when the flame ceased the man was uninjured; he says, moreover, that when Caesar himself was sacrificing, the heart of the victim was not to be found, and the prodigy caused fear, since in the course of nature, certainly, an animal without a heart could not exist.

The following story, too, is told by many. A certain seer warned Caesar to be on his guard against a great peril on the day of the month of March which the Romans call the Ides; and when the day had come and Caesar was on his way to the senate-house, he greeted the seer with a jest and said: Well, the Ides of March are come, and the seer said to him softly: Aye, they are come, but they are not gone.