“Chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange ...
Peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?”
Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god.
The Greek comic writer, Anaxandrides, said to the Egyptians: “You weep if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin it.” The fear lest cats should be profanely treated in Europe led the Egyptians to do all they could to prevent their exportation; they even sent missions to the Mediterranean to ransom the cats borne into slavery and carry them back to Egypt. But these missions could not have reached the cats that had been taken inland, and as the animal increases rapidly, it may have been fairly common from early times. There is no doubt, however, that the number went up with a bound when Egypt became Christian, and every monk who came to Europe brought shoals of cats, the date corresponding with that of the first invasion of the rat in the trail of the Huns.
BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT.
(Collection of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère, French Ambassador at Rome.)
Antiquity regarded the cat, before all things, as a little beast of prey. Nearly every reference to it gives it this character. In the stele at Athens the cat is supposed to be looking at a bird-cage to which the man is pointing; the man holds a bird in his left hand, presumably the pet of the child who stands by him. It seems as if the cat meditated if it had not performed some fell deed. Seneca observed that young chickens feel an instinctive fear of the cat but not of the dog. The fine mosaic at Pompeii shows a tabby kitten in the act of catching a quail.
Only one ancient poet, by a slight magician-like touch, calls up a different vision: Theorcitus makes the voluble Praxinœ say to her maid: “Eunœ, 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.” There—at last—is the cat we know! But after all, it is an Egyptian cat: a cat sure of her privileges, a cat who relies on her goddess prototype, and has but a modicum of respect for the chattering little Syracusan woman in whose house she condescends to reside. Such were not cats of ancient Greece and Rome, who, from being un-appreciated, fell back to the morals of the simple ravager.