Old World Pets by Agnes Repplier

We have grown to be very narrow-minded, very exclusive, and hopelessly unimaginative in our choice of domestic pets. We love and cherish the dog, and we have a sentiment, less universal but far more disinterested, in favor of the beautiful and cold-hearted cat. We keep canaries in gilded cages-and there the matter practically ends. A few rabbits in a hutch-which are never petted-an occasional parrot feared by its master and hated by its master's friends; a little song-bird imprisoned now and then, and slowly dying of despair; these are instances, happily too infrequent to count very heavily in the scale. As a fact, many people value the dog and cat for their serviceable qualities alone; exiling the first to the kennel and the second to the kitchen, and liking both, as Miss Mitford confessed she liked children, "in their place"-meaning any place where she was not.

But when we turn back to the past we find, or think we find, a very different state of affairs; an almost endless variety of little wild creatures, tamed by luxury and love. The dog still holds his own, and we need look no further than the _Odyssey_ to see, in the great hound Argus, the splendid sagacity, the unswerving loyalty, which centuries have not altered or impaired. I have always wished that Argus could have had Sir Walter Scott, rather than the crafty Odysseus for a master. There is also a pathetic dialogue in Theocritus between two old fishermen, who are so poor they may not even own a watchdog to guard their scanty spoils:

"All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was their sentinel. They had no neighbor by them, but ever against their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea."

Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, and probably found such easy domesticity more to their tastes than the burdensome honors of Egypt. In fact, when the Egyptian cat was not living in sanctified seclusion as the friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparently earning a laborious livelihood as a retriever, if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in the British Museum, which shows us a magnificent animal carrying no less than three struggling wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when Puss at last entered Greece and Rome, about the time of the Christian era, or perhaps a century or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; and Mr. Pater in "Marius the Epicurean" describes very charmingly the snow-white beast brought by one of the guests to a Roman banquet, and purring its way among the wine-cups in response to caresses and coaxing words. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson, that most winning chronicler of the cat's vicissitudes and triumphs, has also told us in graceful verse the history of a Greek lover who loses his mistress because he dares not bring her from Egypt one of these coveted and mysterious creatures:

"A little lion, small and dainty sweet, / (For such there be! ) / With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet, / She prayed of me. / For this, through lands Egyptian far away / She bade me pass; / But, in an evil hour, I said her nay- / And now, alas! / 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:

"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."