Beginning In Greece

c.560 B.C. Aesop and Pilpay created their fables.

500 B.C., and later. The height of Etruscan culture, from which art depicting the cat was found. One vase painting shows two women playing with a cat, teasing it with a bird.

480 B.C. Greek marble relief from the Themistoclean wall near Athens depicts: men trying to make a cat and dog fight.

c.450 B.C. Herodotus, traveller, historian and anthropologist, commented on Egyptian cats.

c.400 B.C. Tarentum (Greece) coins minted. Two depict a cat, one of which is shown leaping at a bird held in a woman's hand.
Aristophanes, the most celebrated Greek comic poet, included a cat as one of the items offered for sale by the Boetian in "The Acharnians."

c.350 B.C. Anaxandrides of Rhodes, Greek comic poet, has one of his characters in "The Cities" say to an Egyptian, "If you see a cat indisposed you weep for it. For my part I am well pleased to kill it for its skin."

Cats appear on Greek vase paintings. One shows a man throwing a ball into the air to amuse a cat; another shows a man holding one on his arm.
Aristotle, pupil of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, a diversified scholar but at his best as a naturalist, mentioned the cat only briefly.

c.320 B.C. Timocles, Greek comic poet, is credited with saying that he certainly would not fear violating cat shrines when irreverence to the great gods themselves went unpunished.

c.270 B.C. In his fifteenth Idyll, Theocritus, one of the most celebrated Greek pastoral poets, has a character called Praxinoe who is in a hurry to leave for a feast call to her slave: "Eunoa! my cloak, you wanton, quickly raise, And place it near me-cats would softly sleep."

Prof. Rolleston disagreed with this translation by Chapman. He argued that the word translated as cloak actually means towel. Praxinoe wishes to wash before going out and sees that cats are asleep on the towel, so she calls, "Eunoa, give me the towel, stupid. Cats always have to sleep on a soft bed."

Whether cats were actually present or whether Eunoa was merely being compared to one makes no difference. The conclusion is the same; cats must have been domestic animals in some homes at least in the third century B.C. and were already noted for their ability to choose comfortable sleeping places.

c.100 A.D. Plutarch, Greek biographer and essayist (c.50-120), wrote a little about cats.