“The domestic cat which has eaten my partridge flatters himself that he is still to live under my roof. No, dear bird, I will not leave thee unavenged, but on thy grave will I slay thy murderer. For thy shade, which roams tormented, cannot be quieted until I shall have done that which Pyrrhus did upon the grave of Achilles.”
As if these direful threats were not enough, Damocharis, a disciple of Agathias, follows up the case with a third epigram in which he bewails the cruelty of the cat, and compares it with burning eloquence to one of Aktæon’s hounds, which devoured its own master. “Here is a pretty pother about a partridge!” protests M. Champfleury, with the pardonable irritation of one who is wont to deal leniently with the shortcomings of his favorite animal, and who fails to sympathize with this excess of grief. Pet partridges, indeed, are hardly in accord with modern taste, which is apt to regard them from the same simple point of view as did the cat of Agathias. Neither is the sparrow a popular plaything as in the days when Lesbia wept inconsolably for her dead bird, and Catullus sang in silvery strains to soothe her wounded heart. With what generous sympathy the lover laments and calls on the Loves and Graces, and on all the fair youths of Rome to lament with him this shocking and irreparable loss:
“Dead my Lesbia’s sparrow is,
Sparrow that was all her bliss,
Than her very eyes more dear.”
How sombre is the picture he draws of the little petted creature that in life never strayed from the white bosom of its mistress, and that now must tread alone the gloomy pathway whence not even a bird may return. It is really heartrending to listen to his grief:
“Out upon you and your power
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus’ gloomy shades! that e’er
Ye took my Bird that was so fair.