• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 488 0

about cats were clearly beginning to affect international matters. There were cat troubles with Greece. Egypt had passed laws making it illegal to sell cats out of the country, so the Greeks, bothered by rats and mice and weary of dealing with the voracious and disagreeable weasels they used to catch them, stole cats. They supported a regular pirate trade in cats, with severe diplomatic repercussions. Egypt even sent missions around the Mediterranean ports trying to buy back her cats, with only moderate success. A Greek bas-relief from the fifth century A.D. shows a cat on a leash about to attack a dog, so clearly some very tough specimens were leaking out to the larger world. (An entirely different line of thought holds that the Greeks had no domestic cats, valuing them only for their fur, which was widely worn by the poor, and the cat was on a leash to keep it from escaping an arranged fight with the dog.)

In the first century B.C., during a delicate period in Egypt’s relations with Rome, a Roman soldier killed a cat by accident and was mobbed by the Egyptian crowds in spite of frantic official attempts at intervention. According to one report, he was killed and his body dragged through the streets, and the incident led to a series of reprisals and rebellions that plagued international relations all the way to the suicide of Cleopatra and Egypt’s decline.

Cats continued to spread. The Phoenician sailors, mobile traders of the eastern Mediterranean since the tenth century B.C., probably carried them, deliberately or accidentally or both; sailors have always had a soft spot for cats, and Phoenicians always had a sharp eye for trade goods. Some say they carried them as far as England. Some say cats found their way through Europe by way of Greece, and others that the Roman legions took them, part of the “impedimenta” Caesar was always complaining about; cat remains have been found in Roman villas in Britain.

In Rome, where today officially protected cats sleep in the sun on Keats’s and Shelley’s graves, the cat became a tutelary spirit, no longer a reigning deity in charge of all the major aspects of life and death, but a humble hearth watcher. With the mental split we still manage today, the Romans considered her both a protector of the home and an emblem of liberty. They were a cleanly people for their time, and no doubt admired the immaculate cat, but probably their straight-edged military minds were never deeply tuned to the feline.

It’s said that the Greek general Galsthelos, who commanded Pharaoh’s army, fled to Portugal after his defeat when the Red Sea parted. He took along his wife Scota, the Pharaoh’s beautiful daughter, who naturally brought her cats. Centuries later their descendant, Fergus I, became ruler of a northern kingdom he called Scotland after his ancestress, and introduced to Britain the descendants of her cats.

Accepted opinion puts cats in Gaul in the fourth or fifth century A.D., by which time they were catching mice as far away as China, but there’s a statuette and a table pedestal from the first or second century that shows them already comfortably established there. The statuette wears a collar and looks entirely domestic; the cat on the pedestal is held by a small boy and wears a bell to frighten off evil spirits. All the early Gallic cats look cuddlier than the Egyptian, rounder and fatter, and are shown being clutched and carried in awkward positions, often by children, gods no more.

The pragmatic historians keep reminding us that the cat spread around the world following the spread of rats and mice, and was taken up by humans solely to protect granaries—or, in China, silkworm cocoons—from rodent teeth. They tell us that back when man was a hunter the cat was hated as a rival in the hunting field (though I’ve found no early paintings of men hunting mice for the table), and that as farming and grain storing spread the cat became accepted as an ally.

No one will admit of cats as self-indulgence.

Maybe history exaggerates the utilitarian. Maybe we’re attributing too much common sense to