Cats in Ancient Fable
What did the ancient Greeks & Romans think about cats? Were the creatures useful only as rodent control, or did they make good domestic pets? Could they be trusted—were they as faithful as dogs? Our best evidence for Greek and Roman attitudes toward these animals comes from the characterization of cats in Aesopian fables.
Only a dozen of the several hundred surviving fables feature cats, and the stories don’t quite seem to know what to make of them. Instead, the fables use cats to characterize others, who learn various lessons from their attempts to interact with the creatures. In this talk, we’ll look at several ancient fables, including “The Cat and the Birds” and “The Fox and the Cat,” that shed light on the cat’s abilities and personality as perceived in classical antiquity.
Image: Cat killing a bird (partridge or quail). Roman mosaic, House of the Faun, Pompeii.
Late second century BCE to first century CE. Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2011. CC-PD-Mark
Speaker Bio:
Debbie Felton is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches ancient Greek and Latin as well as various courses in translation, such as “Fairy Tales in the Ancient World,” “Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean,” and “Monsters of Classical Myths.” She specializes in folklore in classical literature and has published on various folklore-related topics including ghosts and witches. She is the author of Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (1999) and Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (2021). She has also edited several volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (2024). Her current project is a volume on revenants in the ancient world (with Reaktion Books).
Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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