Palladius wrote (fourth century a.d.), tame mustelae were still more common than cats, whether called cati or catti.
Evagrius scholasticus (Hist. Eccl. 17, 23), about 600 a.d., speaks of (
Greek characters)[1] as the common name of (Greek characters), here meant, therefore, for cat. He says: (Greek characters).
And Isidorus, his contemporary, expresses himself in the same sense when saying (12, 2, 38), 'hunc (murionem) vulgus catum a captura vocant.'
If we admit, in the absence of evidence to the contrary effect, that the tame cat came from Egypt to Greece and Italy in the fourth century a.d., and that the shrewd little animal was called by the Romans cătus, everything else becomes intelligible.
In the ruins of Pompeii, where the bones of horses, dogs, and goats have been found, no bones of cats have hitherto been discovered, and the pictures there which were supposed to be intended for cats, are now proved to be at all events not pictures of the tame cat[2].
In the language of Roumania no traces exist of the word catus, probably because at the time when that Romanic dialect became settled in Dacia, cătus did not yet exist as a Latin name for cat[3].
Mice were very troublesome, no doubt, to Greeks and Romans, but they fought against them, and against lizards and snakes also, not by cats, but by the (Greek characters) or (Greek characters), the (Greek characters), and the (Greek characters) or (Greek characters). We must not suppose that the names of these animals were used by the ancients with anything like zoological accuracy. So much only is certain that, before the fourth century b.c., none of them,
- ↑ Catta in Martialis, 13, 69, seems to be a kind of bird.
- ↑ Hehn, l. c. p. 402.
- ↑ Hehn, l. c. p. 531.
to the shrew-mouse, which looks like a small mole, and belongs to a family not far removed from the talpidae. Topo does not mean a mouse properly, though in general language it is thus loosely employed.'
