There is a general notion that cats “were almost unknown to Greek and Roman antiquity”—these are the words of so well-informed a writer as M. S. Reinach. Yet instances exist of paintings of cats on Greek vases of the fifth century, and I was interested to see in the Museum at Athens a well-carved cat on a stele. Aristotle, who, like Plutarch, mentions cats in connexion with weasels (both, he says, catch birds), reckons the time they live at six years, less than half the life of an average modern cat; this may indicate that though known, they were not then acclimatised in Europe. Æsop has four fables of cats: 1. A cat dressed as a physician offers his services to an aviary of birds; they are declined. 2. A cat seeks an excuse for eating a cock; he fails to find the excuse, but eats the cock all the same. 3. A cat pretends to be dead so that mice may come near her. 4. A cat falls in love with a handsome young man and induces Venus to change her into a lovely maiden. But on a mouse coming into the room, she scampers after it. Venus, being displeased, changes her back into a cat. This belongs to a large circle of folk-tales, and probably all these fables came from the East. Herodotus tells as a “very marvellous thing” that cats are apt to rush back into a burning house, and that the Egyptians try to save them, even at the risk of their lives, but rarely succeed: hence great lamentation. Also, that if a cat die in a house all the dwellers in it shave their eyebrows; “the cats, when they are dead, they carry for burial to the city of Bubastis.” The Egyptian name for light (and for cat) is _Mau_, and the inference is irresistible, that the Egyptians supposed the cat to be constantly apostrophizing the sacred light of which she was the symbol. Nothing shows the strength of tradition better than the existence of an endowment at Cairo for the feeding and housing of homeless cats. If the cat in Europe had been a rarity so great as most people think, it would have been more highly prized. It seems nearer the truth to say that it was not admired. Its incomplete domestication which attracts us, did not attract the ancient world. Tame only so far as it suits their own purposes, cats patronize man, looking down upon him from a higher plane, which, if only the house-top, they make a golden bar. “Chat mystérieux, Chat séraphique, chat étrange ... Peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?” Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god.