Ancient Roman Dog Breeds

[Primitivus]

One of my projects it to reproduce one of the Cave Canem mosaics from Pompeii. It looks like a medium size dog, black and white, small ears, feathery tail and legs, and looks rather like a border collie, but then, somewhat not like a collie.

As the proud owner of border collies, I would say the main parallel to the primary Pompeii mosaic is coloration. The latter is heftier than today's sheep-herding dogs. I've seen a couple other mosaics which (like my avatar) reveal somewhat more slender dogs. Makes me curious about what sorts of different breeds existed during the Roman era. (It's inconceivable that only one breed existed, as some pseudo-historians allege.)