Far-traveled Nicias hath wooed and won
Arsinoë
With gifts of furry creatures white and dun
From over-sea.”
In the Museum of Antiquities, at Bordeaux, there is a mutilated tomb of the Gallo-Roman period showing still the indistinct outlines of a young girl and her two pets; a cat clasped—very uncomfortably—in her arms, and, at her feet, a dignified cock, which appears to be pecking viciously at poor pussy’s drooping tail.
The few allusions we find to the cat in later Greek poetry are hardly of a flattering nature. Theocritus makes the impatient Praxinoë, in his XVth Idyl, say to her handmaid, “Eunoë, bring the water and put it down in the middle of the room, lazy creature that you are! Cats like always to sleep soft,”—quite as if it were disgraceful in them to enjoy their ease. The same passage is interpreted somewhat differently, and in a still more uncharitable spirit by Mr. Matthew Arnold: “Eunoë, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again! The cats find it just the bed they like.” At least we know, by this token, that Puss was an inmate—understood if not honored—of the Alexandrian household. There is also a dog; for Praxinoë, on going out, bids Phrygia, the nurse, “Take the child, and keep him amused; call in the dog, and shut the street door.”
Perhaps it was the very diversity of pets that so often brought the cat into disgrace. She is not wont to tolerate divided affections, and the old primitive, savage instincts are very strong within her little breast. Consequently, there comes down to us out of the past a bitter wail of lamentation from foolish mortals who seem to have forgotten what a natural and wholesome thing it is for one creature to devour another. Agathias, a poet of the sixth century, has left us two mournful epigrams upon a favorite partridge ruthlessly done to death by a swift-footed and hungry cat:
“O my partridge! Poor exile from the rocks and the heath, thy little willow house possesses thee no longer. No more dost thou rustle thy wings in the warmth of the rising sun. A cat has torn off thy head. I seized thy body and rescued it from his cruel jaws. Let the earth lie not too lightly on thee, lest thy enemy discover and drag thee from thy quiet grave.”
The second epigram is quite as disconsolate and more vengeful in its tone: