316 M. Bureau on the Ancient History of 



mals for enabling him to get rid of this pest. How should he 

 not have sought to tame the cat, which is their cruelest enemy, 

 and which could not fail to be the most powerful auxiliary of 

 man in this active, perpetual, and daily warfare? 



The mythological traditions * which relate, that, during the 

 war of Typhon, the gods fled into Egypt, and metamorphosed 

 themselves into various animals ; Apollo into a hawk, Diana in- 

 to a cat, Latona into a mouse, confirm the antiquity of the exist- 

 ence of the cat and of glii-es in Egypt and Greece. 



But, as I have said, the cat at this period bore the name of 

 y^Asj. This is the opinion of Henri Etienne f and Coray, who, 

 nevertheless, err in applying it only to the weazel and cat, while 

 it also designates generically various species of canivorous ani- 

 mals of the genus Mustela, tamed by the ancients and associated 

 by them with the cat in the destruction of glires. 



We have seen that Herodotus, Aristotle, iElian, Uiodorus, 

 and the fables of iEsop give the name xthH^oi; to the cat, whe- 

 ther wild or tame. At a later period, when the Latin name 

 catus, Kinrrcg, prevailed among the Greeks, as designalive of the 

 domestic cat, the name oiiX\s^oi was applied to the wild cat. At 

 a little later period, the domestic cat resumed the name of yetx^, 

 which had been its original name at the commencement of lite- 

 rature. 



The word y«Asi, which occurs three times in the Batraclio- 

 myomachia^ must, in my opinion, have been applied to the 

 cat, and even to the domestic cat. This is also the opinion of 

 Henri Etienne and Barnes §, who have been combated by 

 Perizonius ||, Perotto, Philonenus Conradus and Lycius. 



The synonymy of the words yxXm and xiXa^oi. and the desig- 

 nation of the cat by Homer under the name of yaxeu, will be 

 fixed by comparing a verse of Callimachus IT with another of 

 the Batrachomyomachia, of which the former is an imitation, 

 or to which it evidently alludes. 



Homer makes one of his rats say, -rMTo-rev Se ya/suv -n^ihi^ict, it 

 is the ytcMn that I fear most ; and Callimachus says, " that 



" ApoUodor. I. vi. 3. Hygin. cap. 19C. Ovid. Met. v. 330. Anton. l>i- 

 beral, cap. 28. 



f Under the word yux^. X ^> ^1) H^- § Batrach, 1. c 



II Apud jElian, xiv. 4. ^ H. ad Cer. iii. 



