Hircocervus

19th century engraved reproduction of "The Trusty Servant"

The hircocervus (Latin: hircus, "billy goat" + cervus, "stag") or tragelaph (Greek: τράγος, tragos, "billy goat" + έλαφος, elaphos, "stag"), also known as a goat-stag or horse-stag, was a legendary creature imagined to be half-goat, half-stag. In his work De Interpretatione, Aristotle utilized the idea of a fabulous goat-stag to express the philosophical concept of something that is knowable even though it does not really exist.^[1] In Plato's Republic, Socrates speaks of his own image-making as similar to that of painters who paint goat-stags, combining the features of different things together (488a).

The word hircocervus first appears in the English language in a medieval manuscript dating from 1398 (now at the Bodleian Library).^[1]

A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called The Trusty Servant, painted by John Hoskins in 1579. dating from the 1580s.^[2] It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.^[1] The author Arthur Cleveland Coxe described "the time-honoured Hircocervus, or picture of 'the Trusty-servant,' which hangs near the kitchen, and which emblematically sets forth those virtues in domestics, of which we Americans know nothing. It is a figure, part man, part porker, part deer, and part donkey; with a padlock on his mouth, and various other symbols in his hands and about his person, the whole signifying a most valuable character."^[3]

The painting had a didactic function: it is accompanied by allegorical verses that associate the hircocervus servant's various animal parts with distinctive virtues that the college's students were meant to follow.^[4]

The Latin verses have been translated into English as:

A trusty servant's picture would you see,
This figure well survey, who'ever you be.
The porker's snout not nice in diet shows;
The padlock shut, no secret he'll disclose;
Patient, to angry lords the ass gives ear;
Swiftness on errand, the stag's feet declare;
Laden his left hand, apt to labour saith;
The coat his neatness; the open hand his faith;
Girt with his sword, his shield upon his arm,
Himself and master he'll protect from harm.^[1]

1. ^ Quoted in Howard Staunton, The Great Schools of England (Strahan. 1869), 61n.

Umberto Eco refers to a hircocervus in his novel The Island of the Day Before.^[1]

Martin Luther uses the term “Goat-stag” (tragelaphus in his Latin) in his “Theses Against the Antinomians (1540, Sixth Set)” to describe “a law that does not condemn.” Luther is stating that one can imagine a law from God that only instructs or teaches without threatening and condemning human sin. However, Luther claims that such a law, often sought by theologians throughout Christian history, does not actually exist. ^[5]

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