In the first or second century CE, a Roman dog named Margarita received a marble epitaph. The verses give her a voice of her own. She had come from Gaul, pursued game across difficult country, escaped the heavy restraints sometimes imposed on dogs, and enjoyed a place on her owners’ laps and in their bed. Her death merited a carefully composed memorial. Margarita had been useful as a hunting dog, but the people who kept her also remembered her as a much-loved companion.
Dogs were familiar companions in Roman households, though they were hardly the only animals people kept. Songbirds, parrots, ravens and monkeys appear in surviving accounts, while domestic cats became more widespread during the imperial period. An animal might be trained to hunt or guard, kept for its song, or displayed because it was difficult and expensive to obtain. An animal valued for its work might also be mourned when it died. Our evidence comes from inscriptions, literature, art and archaeology, each preserving a different part of this domestic world.
The history of cats has become particularly revealing. A major genetic study published in 2025 found that the ancestors of today’s European domestic cats appear to have spread from North Africa around the Roman period, considerably later than the arrival once associated with Europe’s earliest farmers. At roughly the same time, people at a port in Roman Egypt were burying cats, dogs and monkeys with evident care. These findings reveal different kinds of companionship across an empire stretching from Britain to the Red Sea.
Dogs in Roman Homes: Guardians, Hunters and Companions
Dogs served Romans in the countryside and in cities alike. Farmers depended on them to protect livestock and buildings; hunters prized their ability to track and pursue animals. A town dog might guard the entrance, accompany someone through the streets or sleep indoors. Ancient authors categorized dogs by their size, origin and usefulness rather than by the fixed pedigree breeds familiar from modern kennel registries. A household could accommodate an imposing watchdog and a small animal kept mainly for company.
Writing in the first century CE, the agricultural author Columella advised landowners to choose dogs according to the work expected of them. In On Agriculture, book 7, he discussed guardians for farm buildings, dogs to defend flocks and animals used in hunting. He favored a dark-coated farm guardian because an intruder would struggle to see it at night, and a pale sheepdog because its owner could tell it apart from wolves. Columella was advising estate owners on working dogs, one part of a much wider range of relationships Romans had with these animals.
At Pompeii, a mosaic portraying a chained dog bears the warning cave canem, or ‘beware of the dog’. It advertises the protective role of the household animal at the very point where a visitor enters, although the mosaic cannot tell us whether a dog was always there. Roman fiction could make the watchdog a source of comedy. During Trimalchio’s ostentatious banquet in Petronius’ Satyricon, chapter 64, the huge Scylax enters on a chain and fights a servant’s fat little dog, creating uproar among the diners. Petronius uses the episode to ridicule his host’s vulgar display of riches, drawing on a recognizable contrast between an intimidating guardian and a pampered small dog.
Dogs also accompanied Romans into the commemoration of the dead. The funerary altar of Anthus shows the boy beside a small animal that the Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies as his pet dog. His father, Lucius Iulius Gamus, commissioned the monument in the first half of the first century CE. The carving cannot establish how long Anthus had owned the dog or whether it attended the funeral. His father nevertheless chose to include it in the boy’s memorial.
The verses for Margarita are more intimate still. The British Museum’s marble plaque preserves a poem in the dog’s imagined voice, with echoes of Virgil and Ovid. She had come from Gaul, could hunt, had not suffered beatings or harsh restraints, and slept beside her owners. She died giving birth. Choosing an accomplished Latin poem and a carved stone required an owner prepared to spend money on her memory. The inscription reveals a particular bond, however, and cannot tell us that Roman dogs generally enjoyed Margarita’s circumstances.
Margarita was not the only dog to receive a named epitaph. Roman commemorative customs could extend to animals, especially where owners had the resources to commission stone inscriptions. This leaves the record weighted toward unusually elaborate examples. Dogs that protected farms, scavenged through settlements or lived on the streets rarely left a trace of their individual lives. Even within one home, a dog’s duties and the affection it received could change according to its role and the people who dealt with it.
In Epigrams 1.109, Martial praises Issa, a tiny dog owned by a man named Publius. She nestles silently against her owner’s neck, appears to understand his feelings and has been portrayed in a painting intended to preserve her likeness after death. The poet compares her with expensive gems and Catullus’ celebrated sparrow, deliberately exaggerating her charms. Martial exaggerates for comic effect, assuming his readers would recognize the lengths to which some people went for their favorite small dogs.
The second-century CE Greek-speaking Roman official Arrian described hunting dogs from Celtic regions with admiration. A small bronze sighthound in the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities, excavated at Roman Voorburg, suggests what one of the swift dogs he valued may have looked like. The museum associates the sculpture with Arrian’s account, while recognizing that the identification is interpretive. Hunting ability could bring an animal admiration and personal attachment, and an owner might choose to have such a dog represented in bronze. Work and affection were entirely compatible.
Birds That Sang, Spoke and Became Family Favorites
Birds offered pleasures different from those of dogs. Romans might hold a sparrow, allow a dove to perch on a child’s hand or train a raven or parrot to repeat speech. Their movement, colors and calls made them attractive indoors, and speaking birds could entertain visitors. Romans also ate birds, sacrificed them, made them fight or observed them for religious purposes. A literary reference to a quail or goose is therefore insufficient evidence that anyone regarded it as a pet.
The poet Catullus, active in the first century BCE, wrote of the sparrow cherished by Lesbia, the woman addressed in his love poetry. She plays with the bird in her lap, and after its death the poet calls on the powers of love to grieve. Scholars dispute how literally the sparrow should be understood within Catullus’ elaborate treatment of desire and loss. The poems nevertheless made a vocabulary of affection for a small animal available to later writers. When Martial compares Issa with Lesbia’s sparrow, he expects his readers to recognize precisely that association.
Pliny the Elder was especially interested in birds that copied human speech. In Natural History 10.58, the Roman natural historian describes a parrot from India that can repeat words, including greetings addressed to an emperor. He also records methods of training that readers today would consider cruel. Producing a talking bird required costly attention and control, even as its ability made it a desirable entertainer. His account broadly accords with trade in South Asian parrots, though his statements about their behavior should be read as ancient natural history rather than modern zoological observation.
Pliny also recounts the fate of a raven raised near Rome’s Temple of Castor. In Natural History 10.60, the bird greets Tiberius, Germanicus and Drusus by name, along with people passing through the Forum. A shoemaker eventually kills it. According to Pliny, the public reacts angrily, the bird receives a funeral and its killer is punished. His account is shaped to illustrate Roman collective feeling and may heighten the reaction. Still, the story shows how a well-known trained animal could become part of public life rather than remaining merely its keeper’s property.
Depictions of birds do not always point to pet ownership. The Kimbell Art Museum’s mosaic of a parrot, dated to about 400 CE, belongs to a period when animal imagery could carry Christian associations as well as ornamental appeal. The museum suggests that a parrot’s ability to speak might evoke a miracle and possibly the Virgin Mary. The mosaic shows that parrots were recognizable subjects in late Roman art, though it cannot establish that anyone living in the building kept one.
Children holding birds also appear in Greek funerary reliefs, among them a fifth-century BCE stele portraying a girl with two doves. Roman patrons borrowed and adapted many Greek artistic conventions, so a child embracing a bird might evoke remembered companionship, innocence or a combination of both. Such scenes record the associations patrons wanted viewers to recognize; they do not necessarily depict animals that lived in those households.
The choice of bird could also say something about wealth. Sparrows and pigeons were accessible locally, whereas exotic species required merchants and handlers to move living animals over long distances. Rome’s connections with the eastern world allowed affluent buyers to obtain parrots. The sound of a bird could be enjoyed in many homes, but the rarest trained birds also advertised the money and contacts of their owners. Their confinement and training were part of what made such ownership possible.
Monkeys and the Cost of Exotic Companionship
Monkeys were more unusual than dogs and familiar birds. Roman writers noticed their humanlike movements and intelligence, sometimes finding them amusing and sometimes using them to mock their owners’ extravagance. Identifying a particular species from an ancient reference is difficult: terms such as simia did not operate as precise modern zoological classifications, and artists often exaggerated an animal’s appearance. The monkey’s rarity in Italy contributed to its attraction as an exotic possession.
Macaques from North Africa were known around the Mediterranean, while Roman trading routes also stretched across the Indian Ocean. Until recently, much of the evidence for people keeping primates consisted of artistic depictions and literary remarks. Excavations at Berenike, a Roman port on Egypt’s Red Sea coast, have produced skeletons of monkeys placed in deliberate graves, sometimes with collars or accompanying objects. Archaeologists can now investigate individual animals, where they came from and how they were treated, rather than relying entirely on what Roman authors chose to say about them.
A 2025 study in the Journal of Roman Archaeology describes approximately three dozen Indian macaque burials at Berenike, dating to the first and second centuries CE. The researchers present these finds as the first zooarchaeological evidence that living primates were brought from India into the Roman world. Collars, iridescent shells and apparently selected food offerings accompanied some of the animals. Such treatment suggests that these monkeys mattered to members of the port community, although their bones do not identify the people who owned or cared for them.
Military officers and wealthy residents are among the possible keepers proposed by the researchers. Berenike stood on commercial routes connecting Roman Egypt with Arabia and India, through which pepper, textiles and other goods were carried. Living animals traveled along those routes too. An Indian macaque needed food and restraint in a port where it could not simply live as it had in its native environment. Its presence points simultaneously to long-distance trade, wealth and a relationship between a person and an animal.
Literary ridicule provides only a partial view of that relationship. A monkey mimicking people offered Roman satirists an easy way to mock luxurious households and their amusements. Such performances tell us little about what happened when there was no audience. At Berenike, some primates were deliberately buried and accompanied by objects, showing that attention could continue after death. The graves provide unusually direct evidence of care, though they cannot tell us how commonly Roman households kept monkeys.
The Pet Cemetery at Berenike
Founded by the Ptolemies in the third century BCE, Berenike lay on the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea. The Ptolemies were the Greek-speaking dynasty that governed Egypt after Alexander the Great. Under Rome, the port connected the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean with Indian Ocean commerce. Merchants, soldiers, laborers and sailors moved through a community shaped by Egyptian customs and Roman institutions. On the settlement’s edge, archaeologists discovered an animal cemetery that records an intimate aspect of those far-reaching connections.
Excavation of the small-animal cemetery began in 2011. Most bodies were neither mummified like many Egyptian sacred animals nor deposited as offerings with human burials. Instead, people placed them in individual pits or small groups, sometimes wrapping them in cloth or using pieces of pottery to protect them. A 2016 excavation report in Antiquity listed 86 complete cat skeletons, nine dogs and several monkeys among the finds then recovered. Those numbers described the early excavations, before much more of the cemetery had been investigated.
As work continued, the scale became clearer. A 2021 study in World Archaeology described 585 burials, predominantly cats but also dogs and two forms of macaque, dated broadly between the mid-first and mid-second centuries CE. Archaeologists found animals suffering serious injury or illness, including ailments likely to have made survival without assistance difficult. They argue that some were fed and sheltered after they could no longer look after themselves. The bones support the interpretation of continued care, although they cannot reveal the full circumstances or motivations of every keeper.
The graves were arranged deliberately. Some cats lay together, while collars or beads accompanied a few animals. These details cannot establish that their owners understood pet keeping exactly as people do today. They do make the cemetery difficult to explain as a place for casually discarded carcasses. People chose where and how to bury the animals. The excavators interpret the burials as evidence that members of the community regarded some cats, dogs and monkeys as companions deserving attention even after death.
Egyptian communities had long honored and mummified animals, and the goddess Bastet was closely associated with cats. Berenike’s graves, however, differ markedly from large votive deposits. The burials were made in a diverse port community where Egyptian residents, Roman officials and foreign traders may have understood them in different ways. Archaeologists can reconstruct the practice more confidently than the beliefs of any particular person who carried it out.
The graves record forms of care rarely described by wealthy Roman authors. Unlike a polished Latin epitaph, a skeleton can reveal long-term care without the owner having to be literate or able to buy a monument. The burials also document animals and relationships that survive poorly in written sources. Some of the clearest Roman-period evidence for companion cats comes from this Egyptian port. Any history of Roman pets must therefore extend beyond the houses of Rome itself to the many communities living under Roman rule.
When Did Domestic Cats Reach Roman Europe?
Cats had been familiar in parts of the Mediterranean long before Roman imperial rule, particularly in Egypt, where they figured in domestic and religious life. Their appearance in Europe has proved harder to date. A painted cat shows that an artist recognized its shape, and a bone establishes that an individual lived at a site. Neither alone identifies the ancestry of the modern domestic-cat population. Genetic analysis can sometimes separate closely related wild and domestic lineages that are difficult to distinguish from skeletal remains.
An earlier explanation placed the arrival of domestic cats in Europe alongside Neolithic farmers migrating from the Near East. Stored grain encouraged mice, which attracted wildcats, and human communities had reason to tolerate animals that hunted the pests. Research using maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA appeared to support the idea of early dispersal. Such relationships may indeed have developed in the Near East as farming spread. Recent work, however, has changed the proposed date at which the domestic-cat lineage now familiar in Europe became established there.
In November 2025, M. De Martino and colleagues published ‘The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago’ in Science. They examined 87 ancient and modern cat genomes, 70 of them from ancient specimens. By analyzing nuclear DNA, the researchers could compare much more ancestry information than is available from mitochondrial markers alone. Most European cats sampled from before the Roman period belonged to the European wildcat lineage. They were not members of the domestic lineage that subsequently became widespread. This finding challenges the long-held identification of Europe’s earliest farmers as the people who brought the ancestors of modern European house cats.
A specimen from Genoni in Sardinia, dated to the second century BCE, was the earliest in the study with ancestry related to African wildcats. It did not represent an early example of the domestic-cat lineage that would later spread through Europe. The team instead reconstructed a distinct movement of North African wildcats into Sardinia during the first millennium BCE. Those animals contributed to the island’s later wildcat population. Their arrival and the Roman-period expansion of domestic cats represent separate developments.
At Mautern, in modern Austria, a specimen dating to approximately 50 BCE to 80 CE provided one of the early examples of domestic-cat ancestry. Finds from other Roman-period contexts, including military settlements, fit a broader spread within the empire. De Martino and colleagues conclude that cats closely related to today’s domestic population reached Europe from North Africa around two thousand years ago. The genetic findings establish the ancestry of the sampled cats, but individual animals may have reached Europe earlier.
Art has to be read alongside that genetic evidence. The House of the Faun at Pompeii contained a mosaic showing a cat catching a bird above ducks and seafood. Buried when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the work is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Its detailed hunting scene shows that Romans of the period knew what cats looked like. It does not establish that the occupants of the house owned one, how many cats lived in Italy or what ancestry the depicted animal would have had.
Cats that hunted mice and rats may have been useful around grain stores, ships and ports. Food and military supplies traveled over great distances, while grain from Egypt and other North African provinces reached cities throughout the Mediterranean. These movements offer plausible ways for cats to have traveled as well. The genetic study identifies a Roman-period dispersal linked with North Africa, though it cannot show that each cat was carried deliberately by sailors to catch rodents or name the harbor through which the lineage first arrived.
The study also leaves the original location of cat domestication unsettled. The range of African wildcats covered North Africa and parts of the Near East, where people could have formed relationships with them at different times. The authors of the 2025 study explicitly leave open whether domestication took place in Egypt, the Levant or another area. Their strongest conclusion concerns the subsequent journey of domestic-cat ancestors into Europe, rather than the location of a single original domestication event.
Berenike demonstrates why these histories must be distinguished. Cats were receiving individual burials in Roman Egypt during the first and second centuries CE, while signs of domestic-cat ancestry were becoming more common in regions farther north. The animals’ relatively late arrival in European populations says nothing about when humans first began living with them elsewhere. Nor does it diminish their earlier importance in Egypt. Cats spread through an empire in which people already had longstanding relationships with dogs, birds and other animals, and their adoption differed across places.
Who Could Afford a Pet, and What Did Keeping One Mean?
Our sources favor the fortunate and the affluent. Educated writers composed poems; carved monuments cost money; and the decoration of substantial houses is more likely to survive than the possessions of crowded rented rooms. An image of a child beside an animal may also convey what a family considered a fitting expression of love rather than portray a particular companion. None of these limitations proves that poorer Romans lacked pets. It explains why we so seldom learn their animals’ names.
A girl holding doves appears on the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek grave stele, carved around 450 to 440 BCE. This monument predates Roman imperial culture and belongs to Greece, so it cannot be treated as an illustration of a Roman family. It does reveal the older classical practice of associating children with animals in memorial imagery, a convention that Romans could later draw upon. The connections between Greek and Roman art are close, but chronology and cultural origin still matter when interpreting an individual object.
For Romans, an animal could be useful and cherished at the same time. A watchdog might accept treats from a child, and a singing bird could spend its life confined to a cage. A costly imported monkey might depend on a handler for daily care. An animal’s daily life depended partly on who purchased it, fed it and controlled its movements. In households divided by status, enslaved people could perform much of the work required to maintain the pleasures and comforts of wealthy owners, including caring for animals.
The modern word ‘pet’ does not correspond neatly to every ancient relationship. Romans could speak affectionately about animals, children and dependents while also describing animals as possessions to be trained or restrained. Enjoying their companionship did not necessarily mean prioritizing their welfare. The harsh parrot training described by Pliny, the distressed small dog in Petronius’ comic scene and the confinement of exotic monkeys belong to the same society that produced Margarita’s affectionate epitaph.
Where someone lived also shaped the animals available to them. A family at Rome, a rural household in Gaul, a soldier on the Danube and a trader at Berenike inhabited very different environments. Trade and the Roman state connected these communities, particularly in the movement of rare animals, but local customs and resources still varied. The surviving evidence provides no grounds for imagining one typical collection of pets shared by Roman households across the empire.
Romans made further distinctions between treasured companions and the animals they used for food, sacrifice, transport, hunting or spectacle. A person might mourn a dog yet attend public entertainments in which wild animals were killed. The feelings recorded in an epitaph need not have been insincere for this contrast to exist. What counted was the relationship assigned to a particular creature. Roman affection for some animals developed alongside ownership, capture and the exploitation of others.
Inscriptions, poems, funerary art and animal bones preserve different details of how Romans lived with animals. Margarita’s inscription names an animal and records the grief of its owners. Martial could praise small-dog affection while Petronius mocked its excesses. Anthus’ funerary altar brings a dog into the image of a lost child. At Berenike, graves reveal the continued care of cats, dogs and monkeys without a literary text. Ancient DNA then allows historians to trace the spread of one of those species across the empire during the Roman period.
A Roman animal could be a working guardian, a child’s companion, an exotic acquisition or the subject of an elaborate memorial. Often more than one description applied. Domestic cats spread across Europe relatively late, according to the current genetic evidence, but the Romans had been living closely with other animals for centuries. The new feline arrivals joined a much older and geographically varied world of human attachment, work and ownership.
