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The hircocervus ((ラテン語:hircus), "billy goat" + ''cervus'', "stag") or tragelaph ((ギリシア語: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. 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).〔 A hircocervus is depicted in a wall-painting called ''The Trusty Servant'', painted by John Hoskins in 1579. dating from the 1580s.〔(Pattern Histories: The Trusty Servant ) accessed 29 May 2007〕 It hangs outside the kitchen of Winchester College in Hampshire, England.〔 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."〔Arthur Cleveland Coxe, ''Impressions of England''. ((Google Books ))〕 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.〔Mark Thornton Burnett, ''Constructing "monsters" in Shakespearean drama and early modern culture'' (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 139.〕 The Latin verses have been translated into English as:
Umberto Eco refers to a hircocervus in his novel ''The Island of the Day Before''.〔 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. 〔Luther, Martin. ''Weimar Ausgabe''. 39I:358.26-27; Luther, Martin. ''Solus Decalogus Est Aeternus: Martin Luther’s Complete Antinomian Theses and Disputations''. Ed. and trans. Holger Sonntag. Latin and English ed. (Minneapolis: Lutheran Press, 2008): 375. 〕 == References == 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hircocervus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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