Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
—Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
For the most part, rodents and people may be rivals and enemies, yet
the two have a paradoxical intimacy, a bit like a married couple who
cannot live in harmony yet find it impossible to separate. Rats and
mice can adapt to a vast range of environments, and they are quite capable
of living without human beings. Nevertheless, they thrive particularly
in urban settings, where humans inadvertently provide them
with great quantities of food and enclosures for shelter. As carriers of
plague, rodents have killed untold millions of people in the course of
human history. Even today, all our technologies cannot prevent rats
and mice from devouring about a quarter of the grain grown for human
consumption. In the West, rats often appear in nightmares, and
they can inspire revulsion and terror. Nevertheless, their ability to
survive earns grudging respect and admiration from people. In the
Orient, rats are associated above all with prosperity, since they gather
wherever food is plentiful. A Japanese proverb goes, “Getting rich is
to invite the rat” (Sun, p. 29).
Most of folklore up through at least the Renaissance distinguishes
only loosely between rats and mice. In Greek and Latin both
kinds of animals were generally designated by the word “mus,” which
is the origin of our word “mouse.” The word “rat” comes originally
from the Vulgar Latin “rattus,” a term that probably originated in the
Middle Ages. Like they have done with other pairs of closely related
animals— lions and tigers, for example—people have polarized these
rodents as opposites, so in the West the mouse has become beloved
while the rat has become despised. In ancient manuscripts people
usually tend to translate the word “mus” according to whether the rodents
in question seem large and aggressive, like rats, or small and
passive, like mice.
It was not until the nineteenth century that new techniques of
construction enabled people to make buildings ratproof, and before
then rodents were found in every structure, from the barn to the royal
palace. This produced a sort of intimacy with rats and mice, which
must have softened the anger at the damage that they did. Rodents
surely spoiled many meals and even destroyed homes, so it is remarkable
that they were not often demonized in the ancient world.
People might have seen rats and mice only occasionally, but they
could hear them all the time, especially when falling asleep at night.
They could not help but wonder, often with a certain sympathy, what
transpired in the secret society on the other side of holes in the wall.
One early attempt to imagine this is the fable known as “The
Town Mouse and the Country Mouse,” included by the Roman poet
Horace in his Satire II. It tells how a country mouse once received a
city mouse in his humble hole, offering him a few scraps of bacon and
remains of vegetables. The city mouse would hardly deign to touch
such fare. He explained to his rural companion that since life was
short, he should make the most of it by spending his time amid more
pleasant surroundings. A short while later the country mouse accepted
an invitation to dinner from the city mouse. The host brought
in course after course of fine dainties left over from a banquet the
evening before. The guest was rejoicing in his good fortune, when all
of a sudden somebody started banging on the doors and the entire
house trembled at the barking of two ferocious hounds. The terrified
country mouse took his leave, saying he would rather live in peace
than risk his life for sumptuous delights. The fable, a classic expression
of the contrast between the city slicker and the country bumpkin,
has been constantly retold, often set in contemporary urban centers
such as New York or London.
People have been continually amazed at the ability of rodents to
get to food no matter how carefully it seemed to be locked up. Up
through the nineteenth century and even today, they have tried to explain
this with countless anecdotes in which admiration for the ingenuity
of rodents almost always seems to cancel any resentment of
them as pests. Many authors, for example, told how one mouse or rat
would lie on its back and hold an egg in its paws in order to be
dragged like a sled by colleagues. Others would tell how mice stood
on one another’s shoulders to form a living ladder in order to reach
food on a table. Many authors even maintained that rodents had customs
such as burying their dead.
But no affection for rats could ever overcome the practical necessity
of keeping the rodent population under control. The Egyptians
sometimes depicted mice with affection, but they also kept mongooses
and cats in their homes to catch rodents. The eternal rivalry between
cat and mouse became a favorite theme of storytellers, from
Aesop and his fables to the producers of the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons
in America during the twentieth century. In one popular fable
from the Middle Ages, the mice met in council to decide what they
should do about the cat. They agreed that the greatest danger from the
cat lay in the silence of its approach. One mouse proposed that a bell
be tied around the neck of the cat to warn them of its approach. The
members of the council applauded until an old mouse got up and
asked, “Who will bell the cat?”
Herodotus tells of an Egyptian king named Sethos who had once
alienated the warrior class by claiming the soldiers’ ancestral lands.
When the Assyrian Sanacharib invaded Egypt, the warriors refused to
support the king, who was also a priest of the sun god Ra. Sethos entered
the inner sanctuary of Ra’s temple, prayed, and wept until he
fell asleep. The god appeared to him in a dream and told him not to
worry. He should gather whatever soldiers he could, even if they
were only merchants or artisans, and go forth to face the enemy. The
two armies were encamped opposite each other. On the night before
the battle, a swarm of field mice entered the camp of the Assyrians.
They devoured the bowstrings and quivers of the enemy, leaving
them weaponless. Astatue of Sethos was later erected in the temple of
Ra. In his hand, the king held a mouse. The inscription read, “Look on
me, and fear the gods” (book 2, section 141).
Since the lion is a symbol of kingship, it seems possible that that
story may be the ultimate origin of the Aesopian fable “The Lion and
the Mouse,” which was retold by the Roman freedman Phaedrus and
many others. A lion had caught a mouse, which begged to be let go,
saying it might someday return the favor. The lion was so amused at
the idea that so tiny a creature could ever help the king of beasts that
he magnanimously lifted his paw and spared the mouse. Awhile later
hunters caught the lion in a trap. The mouse passed by and, seeing its
friend struggling haplessly, gnawed the ropes and set the lion free.
The Japanese tell a story about the medieval painter Sesshu, who
was once tied up during his childhood as punishment for idling away
his time with art. He drew pictures of rats by moving his feet in the
sand. The pictures were so vivid that the rats came to life and gnawed
at his bonds. A modern rendering of this theme is Edgar Allan Poe’s
famous story “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Rats had tormented a man
who had been tied up in a dungeon by the Inquisition, but they ultimately
liberated him by gnawing away his bonds.
All of the stories of liberation by rats or mice may also refer to
the emancipation of the soul at death. Because of their preference for
human dwellings, rodents have often been taken for the souls of the
departed. Because of their association with the next world, they are
often credited with clairvoyance. Throughout the world, rats leaving
a home or ship is a sign of impending ruin. In another Greco-Roman
fable traditionally attributed to Aesop, a farmer once noticed that a
mountain was rumbling, rocks were tumbling down, and dust was
spewing from its summit. He decided that the mountain was in labor,
and he called his companions to see what it might give birth to. As
they gazed on in fear and wonder, a tiny mouse finally emerged and
came running down the slope. The story may well have originally referred
to the emergence of the soul from the body. Sometimes a rodent
also represents the separable soul, which can run about while a person
is in a trance or asleep. In the Walpurgis Night episode in the first
part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, the protagonist dances
with a young witch at a nocturnal revel, but he is horrified when a rat
leaps out of her mouth and runs away.
This idea of rodents as the souls of human beings seems to underlie
the mysterious tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was
recorded in several versions during the Middle Ages. In 1284 the town
of Hamelin in Germany became infested with rats, and the village
council hired a brightly dressed piper to get rid of them. He played a
mysterious tune that made the rats follow him, and he led them into
the Weser River to drown. The Piper disappeared for a while, but he
returned on Saint John’s Day to demand payment. When the village
refused to pay what the Piper wanted, he began to play his pipe
again, and this time the children followed him. A mountain opened
up to receive the procession and closed after it, so the children were
never seen again. The Grimm brothers made the story famous in their
collection of German legends, and Robert Browning, Goethe, and others
have retold it. Various scholars have traced the tale back to the
bubonic plague, to the Children’s Crusade of the Middle Ages, or to a
migration southward to Bohemia. In any case, the image of the Piper
with the children or rats greatly resembles medieval representations
of Death leading the departed in a dance.
There is also at least a very strong association between rodents
and the dead in the legend of Bishop Hatto of Mainz, Germany. There
was a famine, but Hatto continued to dine in luxury and refused to
lower the prices on his ample store of grain. Finally, weary of hearing
the starving people complain, he invited all who lacked bread to assemble
in a huge barn. Then, instead of offering the people food, he
set the barn on fire and burned them to death. Next morning the
bishop rose and saw that rats had eaten his portrait. A servant informed
him that rats had eaten everything in the granary. He looked
out over his lands to see a huge army of rats descending on the palace.
In terror, the bishop fled to an island in the Rhine and locked himself
up in a structure known today as the Mouse Tower. The rats followed,
gnawed through the door, and finally ate the villain alive.
The perspective on rats in East Asia is far more unequivocally
positive. As legend has it, when the Buddha was near death all the animals
came to pay their last respects. The ox was leading the way, and
the rat hitched a ride upon its back. As they reached the pavilion
where the Buddha lay, the rat jumped down, raced ahead, and arrived
before the other animals. As a reward for piety, the Buddha granted
the rat the first position in the Chinese zodiac.
Daikoku, the Buddhist god of wealth, is often depicted holding
a large bale of rice that is being nibbled at by rats. These rodents serve
him as messengers. The amazing fertility of rodents makes them symbolic
of the way money can increase through good business, though
even Daikoku has sometimes had to guard his store from rats.
In the Middle Ages, rats were sometimes familiars of witches or
forms in which sorcerers ran about at night. It was not, however, until
some centuries after the worst episodes of the bubonic plague that
we start to see intense expressions of aversion and disgust for rats, as
people gradually began to suspect their connection with disease. The
reputation of rats took a drastic turn for the worse at the end of the
nineteenth century, when the French missionary Paul Louis Simmond
discovered that bubonic plague had been caused by a bacillus that
was found on fleas carried by rats. This meant that, without being
identified, rats had been responsible for the deaths of millions of people,
more than were killed in all the wars throughout human history.
Bubonic plague may have been around since the advent of humankind,
but the first probable reference to it is in the Bible. In the
early eleventh century B.C., the Philistines had defeated the Hebrews
and taken the Ark of the Covenant. “The hand of Yahweh weighed
heavily on the people of Ashdod [Philistines] and struck terror in
them, afflicting them with tumors” (1 Sam. 5:6). Outbreaks of the
plague gradually became more common and more severe as the
growth of trade increased the density of population during the Roman
Empire. The plague of Justinian in A.D. 531–532 killed tens of millions,
depopulating entire towns and perhaps destroying what remained
of ancient civilization.
But the most terrible outbreak of all was in 1348–1350, when
bubonic plague destroyed more than one-third of the population of
Europe. The people of Europe then aggravated the plague by killing
cats and dogs, animals that they mistakenly believed had caused the
disease but that actually had helped to keep the population of rats in
check. Literature and the arts seem to have gradually anticipated
medical discoveries about the plague, since over the next several centuries
they increasingly depicted rats, especially in packs, as diabolic.
The plague had sometimes been blamed on Jews, and thousands
of them were burned alive in the Middle Ages in consequence. In the
latter nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rats were often used in anti-
Semitic propaganda. Cartoonists made the proverbial “Jewish nose”
appear like the snout of a rat. In the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal
Jew, directed by Fritz Hippler, the migrations of Jews were compared
to the spread of rats across the world. The physician Hans Zinsser,
doubtless thinking of the two world wars, has observed that the conflict
between the brown rat, indigenous throughout Eurasia, and the
black rat, brought to Western Europe on the boats of crusaders, was a
very close equivalent to armed conflict among human beings. In
George Orwell’s novel 1984, the most dreaded fate for the hero Winston
is to be eaten by rats.
But as the rat has been demonized, the mouse, as though in compensation,
has generally grown more beloved. In 1928 Walt Disney,
then a struggling entrepreneur, introduced one of the first animated
films, which starred Mickey Mouse as Steamboat Willie, a captain
who raucously hooted and danced as he steered his ship. As Disney
Studios grew into a giant corporation, Mickey became more subdued
and, in the eyes of his critics, even bland. The Mickey Mouse Club
was founded as part of the television show Walt Disney Presents. It featured
boys and girls wearing large mouse ears, who sang, danced,
and had adventures.
But if mice were identified with cute little kids in entertainment,
the relations with actual rodents remained as troubled as ever. The
strong identification of human beings with rodents continues to produce
not only affection and respect but also hatred and exploitation.
In the United States alone, at least 20 million rodents are killed every
year in experiments. In 1988 the first patent ever was issued for an animal
other than a microorganism, namely, the “onco-mouse,” which
was genetically engineered to develop cancer so it could be used in research.
The scientific findings will, of course, suggest possible cures
for cancer in human beings, but let us hope the exploitative attitudes
are not generalized to people as well.
Selected References
Aesop. The Fables of Aesop. Ed. Joseph Jacobs. New York: Macmillan,
1910.
Baring-Gould, Sabine. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. London:
Longman’s Green, 1892.
Carlson, Rev. Gergory I. “Horace’s and Today’s Town and Country
Mouse.” Bestia 4 (May 1992): 87–112.
Hendrickson, Robert. More Cunning than Man: A Social History of Rats
and Men. New York: Dorset Press, 1983.
Herodotus. Herodotus (4 vols.). Trans. A. D. Godley. New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1926.
Sax, Boria. The Parliament of Animals: Legends and Anecdotes, 1775–1900.
New York: Pace University Press, 1990.
Sun, Ruth Q. The Asian Animal Zodiac. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1974.
Zinsser, Hans. Rats, Lice, and History. New York: Macmillan, 1963.
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