“She was the sweetest and most loving, slept on my chest, was the accomplice of my dreams and my bed […]. How unfortunate your death is, Myia. You are now trapped in the anonymity of a deep grave.” I discovered it thanks to Fernando Siles) appeared inscribed on a stone slab when the Auch railway station was being built in the south of France in 1865.

It dates from the 1st century AD. C. and Myia were a total bitch.

A bitch? Yes, it’s funny because in recent years, as the West enters its “demographic winter”, there are voices and voices denouncing that we are “going crazy with Vietnamese dogs/cats/pigs” and forgetting “more important things”. .

I won’t go into the depth of the criticism for now, but I asked myself: Is this so-called dog obsession something unique to our time? The answer is of course “not at all”.

City and Dogs. Perhaps the most well-known curiosity about the relationship between Romans and dogs is the Latin phrase ‘cave canem’: “watch out for the dog”. The phrase was featured in a famous mosaic at Pompeii, but it appears to be an inscription that can be found repeatedly in dozens of Roman sites around the world.

It’s not strange. We have known for several years that the Romans took the world around “man’s best friend” very seriously. As a team from the University of Granada discovered in 2020, “there were small dogs as pets, very similar to Chihuahuas or Pekingese.” This refers to a highly developed, institutionalized process of genetic selection and breeding.

Moreover, Like Auch’s tombstonemeans ‘my darling’. In fact, UGR researchers found the dog remains in a necropolis south of the peninsula (normally associated with “child human burials” sites). We know from the chronicles that Emperor Hadrian buried his favorite dogs and horses, but discoveries in recent years make it clear that this practice went much further.

Of course, this event goes back much further. In 2019, a joint team from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Barcelona analyzed more than twenty dogs buried in Neolithic burial sites around the city.

It’s not clear why dogs are buried in human cemeteries as it’s not a widely researched topic, but the available evidence (isotopic analysis, for example, showed dogs and humans have a similar diet) has researchers skeptical. He was buried with his owners to continue to accompany them in death.

None of this should surprise us too much, considering that hundreds of mummies have been found in ancient Egypt, or that Xenophon’s “Kinegetics” devotes a large part of his work to detailing the characteristics of each breed of dog and the most effective training methods. .

So let’s go back to Rome. And Pliny the Elder (as far as we know) was the first to call the dog “man’s most faithful friend”, Marcial dedicating a delicious maxim describing a dog whose owner, Isa, and how they shared their “joys and sorrows.” and, as one can read in the abundant Roman satirical literature, there was also criticism of decadence, which meant “pampering the dogs” (“not only with hugs, but also with food served in plentiful and delicious quantities”).

This seems very important to me because after all we are not original about our obsession with dogs. We don’t even criticize it.

There are many worlds and they are all within this world. We often tend to “naturalize” what we are used to. And for no apparent reason. Because the world is much more diverse, wild, and unclassifiable than “our philosophies imagine.”

I find it particularly interesting to remember that this “demographic decline” is also not new, as criticism of dogs is often linked to low fertility rates.

Like Famous demographer Lyman Stone“The transition to low fertility rates may have occurred in 1500, 1300, 900 or 500 BC; in fact this probably happened in various places around that time, but because this did not occur at the same time as the massive economic growth of the 1900s.” Efforts to improve the standard of living, increase the survival rate of children, and compensate for the population losses due to falling fertility have never been sustained”.

So we have very little to pioneer. And that means that if we go back to dogs, we probably have more Roman burial remains, because the Empire was a time when they could afford such things for a large segment of the population. As is now.

There will be those who argue that this is nothing more than an indication that we live in a “similar” period to the last centuries of the Empire. And it can. We spare no effort to moralize about economic development. I’ll think about it calmly when playing with my dog.

on Xataka | This interactive map lets you travel through the Roman Empire, simulating the conditions of the third century

Image | Italian Ministry of Culture