A charming figurine of a cat capturing a mouse, this playful image was likely to have either been a child’s toy, or a cheeky private ornament of a person's domestic environment. Cats capturing mice would have been commonplace in Rome, and this figurine may simply be an image drawn from everyday life. It could otherwise be, however, a pictorial representation of Aesop’s fable of “The Cat and the Mice”.
The Cat and the Mice is a fable attributed to Aesop of which there are several variants. The Greek version of the fable recorded by Babrius concerns a cat that pretends to be a sack hanging from a peg in order to deceive the mice.
The moral of the fable was to avoid being conned by the innocent airs of a deceitful creature.