Re: VMs: Catoblepas

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

13/10/2004 10:39:29 AM, Andrew Sweeney <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>A catoblepas is an imaginary creature described in Pliny's Natural 
>History and later in medieval bestiaries. Essentially it's an armoured 
>bull that always looks downward.

I looked it up in my 1900 Encyclopedia:

"Les ancients nommaient catoblépas un animal fantastique
dont la tête cornue était rattachée au corps par un
long cou très grêle et traînait à terre; son regard tuait
tout être qu'il rencontrait".

(The Ancient called catoblepas an imaginary animal whose
 horned head was attached to its body via a very thin long
neck and dragged on the ground; its gaze all beings it met)

And, on the Net:

"Pliny the Elder (Natural History, Book 8, 32): 
The catoblepas lives near a spring in western Ethiopia, 
which some  think to be the source of the Nile. It is 
of moderate size but has a very heavy head which it carries 
with difficulty, so that  its head is always hanging down. 
Its eyes are deadly and anyone who sees them dies instantly."

And:

"Claudius Aelianus (On the Nature of Animals, 7.6) provided 
a fuller description: the creature was a mid-sized herbivore, 
about the size of a domestic bull, with a heavy mane, narrow, 
bloodshot eyes, and shaggy eyebrows. In his description, the 
animal's gaze was not lethal, but its breath was poison, since 
it ate only poisonous vegetation. 

Both authors were probably referring to the gnu."

My encyclopedia also gives it as the modern name for
a sort of gnu. But I don't know where it got the 
"long, very thin neck" from.


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list