Pets in Classical Times

Extract

If you take a walk round the exhibition of Greek and Roman Life in the British Museum, you will see there many fascinating domestic articles of antiquity, brooches, kylices, mirrors, lamps, and many of them you will find to be decorated with pictures of domestic life, of girls and boys, men and women in their natural happy surroundings. What more natural, then, that they should have with them the pets they loved and played with? Their dogs, their rabbits, their quails, cocks, sparrows, geese, their cats, their parrots, cranes, crows, and even their monkeys are all to be seen if we look with a discerning eye.