Hircocervus

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.

The creature is now best-known through The Trusty Servant painting in Winchester College, representing the ideal virtues of its alumni.

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. 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."

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