greek and roman household pets

Today I'm going to send you to a fantastic article I've found, dating from 1949: "Greek and Roman Household Pets," by Francis D. Lazenby.  There you'll find a treasure trove including:

- Supposedly Ajax had a pet snake that followed him like a dog
- Quails were a favorite pet of patrician boys
- The ancestor of our domestic cats may well be the cream-colored Nubian cat
- Cats and weasels are most often interchangeable in ancient sources (that is, you can't really tell what animal exactly they're talking about)

Don't be put off by the footnotes and quotations - there's so much here!  Read it now.

this mouse is a roman flask

www.metmuseum.org
Gift of Renée E. and Robert A. Belfer, 2012

Fashioned by a Roman craftsman in the third century A.D., this graceful glass flask is unusual for several reasons.  It's a mouse, for one thing, with the flask's neck placed to serve as the tail.  It's cobalt blue.  Last but not least, it's embellished with an applied linear detail we currently call "snake-thread."  Read more about this piece here.  And if, like me, you were wondering "Which emperors were there in the third century A.D.?"  maybe this will help.

a horse for the harvest

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Outside the town of Fraga in Spain lie the ruins of the Roman Villa Fortunatus. This villa dates from the third century AD, but its beautiful series of animal mosaics is thought to have been installed a century later.  The series is an agricultural calendar, with an animal representing each month.  Though it's a farming calendar, few of the animals portrayed are domesticated.  This is one of the few: the horse of September with a vine, representing autumnal games and the grapes to be harvested.  At least that's what I've figured out from trying to translate this page on the mosaics, which is part of a fascinating look at the site overall.

2 young ones

www.metmuseum.org. Rogers Fund, 1913

Puppies and babies: best buddies since time immemorial, or at least in this case since sometime in the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD.  The Met has this little bronze as "Greek or Roman," and it's true that during that stretch of time the two cultures were interleaving to a deep extent.  The realism and warmth you see here is as fresh as anything you might create today.  In fact, I'm surprised at how pudgy and winsome the unknown artist managed to make that puppy, since "cute" is not the first adjective generally springing to mind when one thinks about the Greco-Romans.

dogs underfoot: mosaics

By Daderot (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

The elegant hunt scene above is a Roman work from Homs, Syria dating circa 450-462 AD.  It's all too easy to see the same dog mosaics over and over and over again when doing online research, so I was happy to find this website with photos of examples I'd never seen.  Some show in vivid detail how the hunt plays out, which makes me muse afresh on what earlier civilizations found acceptable.  I personally would find it hard to enjoy my pork-stuffed dormice over a mosaic of a hare getting its head snapped off, but I suppose I am a soft barbarian.
Here's the link to the dogs again.
Here's some Roman recipes, with a different prep for dormice.
The website has some modern cat mosaics you may enjoy.