Pard

Also Known As: Latin pardus; Greek πάρδος, pardos; Middle English parde; also perde in early modern English
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It kills at a single bound, and its mating with a lioness was held to produce an entirely third kind of animal.
Role in Mythos: In Greek and Roman natural history and the Latin bestiaries that inherited them, the pard is the swift spotted cat that sires the leopard on an unfaithful lioness.
Relation to Humans: It was written up as a hunting hazard rather than a myth-monster, a beast that dropped on whatever passed beneath its tree. Hunters were said to trap it by exploiting its habit of eating human dung as medicine when it fell sick.

The branch dips, holds, and then loses its weight all at once. Something spotted comes down through the leaves onto the back of an animal walking below, and the whole business is finished before the dust has settled. Pliny put pards in the trees of Africa, crouched in thick foliage, hidden by the boughs, dropping on whatever passed and hunting birds from their own perches. He recorded it as a fact about wildlife. It reads like an ambush.

The pard is not a monster in the ordinary sense. It has no riddle, no curse, no hero who kills it. It is a real cat that the ancient world got wrong for sixteen hundred years, and the getting wrong is the story.

The word came first. Greek pardos, Latin pardus, English pard by way of Old French, and the root is probably Iranian, sitting close to Sogdian purdhank and Persian palang. It meant the spotted cat, and which spotted cat it meant has never been settled. Nick Nicholas, working through the Byzantine material, argued that pardos in Greek usually pointed at the cheetah rather than the leopard, which is exactly the sort of ambiguity that lets an animal turn into something else. Leopardos, the Greek compound behind our leopard, is simply leo and pardos welded together. Lion plus spotted thing. That compound is a theory of parentage disguised as a noun, and the ancient naturalists took it literally.

Here is what they built on it. Pliny, in the eighth book of the Natural History, describes the lion detecting the peculiar odour of the pard on a lioness and avenging the infidelity with enormous fury, so that the lioness learns to wash the scent from herself in a river or else to follow the pride at a considerable distance. Solinus tightened it in the third century: the offspring of lionesses are degraded by adulterous unions with pards, so that lions are indeed produced, but inferior ones. By the time the Aberdeen Bestiary was copied out around 1200 the arithmetic had hardened into doctrine. The leopard is the product of the adultery of a lioness with a pard, and their mating produces a third species. Thomas of Cantimpré added the setting, borrowed from Solinus: in Africa, where water is scarce, the animals crowd together at the rivers and mingle there with various beasts, either by force or by pleasure, and from that the leopards come.

So the pard is one of the few creatures in the bestiary tradition defined chiefly by what it fathers.

Isidore of Seville gave it the sentence everyone afterwards repeated. The pard comes next after the panther; this kind has a mottled coat, and is extremely swift and headlong for blood, for it rushes to kill with a leap. Nine centuries of manuscripts carry that line with barely a word changed. The Aberdeen scribe wrote that it is extremely swift and thirsts for blood, for it kills at a single bound. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, in English translation, called it the most swift beast, with many divers colours and round speckles like the panther, differing from the panther only in that the panther has more white in its spots. Basil the Great, quoted by Thomas of Cantimpré, made the coat a kind of confession: the pard is fierce and very sharp in its attack, and it has a body suited to the movements of its mind, which is to say variegated.

The leap is the whole animal. The Experimentator, whom Thomas also quotes, noted that the pard pursues its prey by leaping rather than running and is very quick to blood, and then added the detail that gives the creature its only real pathos. It happened many times that it rushed to its own death with a violent leap. A beast that has committed everything to one bound cannot call the bound back.

Its other weaknesses are stranger. Bartholomaeus, citing Aristotle, records that when the pard is sick it eats human excrement as medicine, and that hunters learned to hang the stuff high in a tree and wait. The animal climbs for its remedy and they kill it partway up. There is no dignity anywhere in that arrangement. He also notes that the pard is cruel when its whelps are stolen, which is the one line in the whole record that grants it a motive rather than an appetite.

The Byzantines were less impressed. The fourteenth-century poem known as the Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds treats pards as ordinary animals with practical qualities, chiefly that their pelts resist fleas and therefore make excellent bedspreads. The same poem observes that the tail is comically short, like a lynx’s, and that the creature likes to live in quarries. Somewhere between Isidore’s headlong killer and a flea-proof blanket lies the actual cat.

What the pard could do amounts to speed, concealment and one decisive act of violence. The mottling breaks its outline in leaf shadow, the body is built to accelerate rather than endure, and the killing bound closes the distance in a single motion so that the prey has no interval in which to run. It could also, in the logic of the sources, generate a wholly new animal, which is a power granted to almost nothing else in the bestiary.

The limits are the same traits inverted. Its odour, the very thing that identifies it, is what betrays it to the lion and endangers the lioness who consorted with it. The leap that kills is unrecoverable and sometimes kills the leaper. The pelt that keeps fleas off it is worth taking. And the sickness that sends it up a tree after a hunter’s bait shows how easily the swiftest beast in the catalogue could be undone by knowing one thing about its habits. By the eighteenth century, when naturalists had finally separated the leopard and the cheetah into distinct species with parents of their own kind, there was nothing left for the pard to be. It survived only in poetry, in Shakespeare’s soldier bearded like the pard and in Keats declining to be charioted by Bacchus and his pards, a word for a spotted cat that no longer answered to any animal alive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a pard?

A pard is the spotted big cat of Greek and Roman natural history and the medieval Latin bestiaries, described as maneless, mottled, extremely swift and quick to kill. The word is the Greek pardos and the Latin pardus, and it was applied to what we would now call a leopard or a cheetah. Medieval writers treated the pard as a separate species from both the panther and the leopard.

Where does the leopard come from in medieval legend?

Medieval bestiaries held that the leopard was born from the adultery of a lioness with a pard. Pliny the Elder wrote that a lion mates with a pard or a pard with a lioness and that degenerate offspring result from either union, and the Aberdeen Bestiary repeats this, calling the leopard a third species produced by that crossing. Solinus put it more bluntly, saying the lions born of such unions are inferior ones.

How does the pard hunt?

The pard hunts by ambush and by leaping rather than by running. Pliny described pards crouching in the thick foliage of African trees and dropping onto animals passing below, and Isidore of Seville wrote that the pard is headlong for blood and rushes to kill with a leap. The Latin bestiaries say it kills at a single bound.

What is the pard’s weakness?

The pard’s committed leap is its chief vulnerability, and medieval sources record that it sometimes rushed to its own death with a violent bound. Its strong odour also betrays it, since Pliny wrote that a lion could smell a pard on a lioness and would attack her for it. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, citing Aristotle, adds that a sick pard eats human dung as medicine, and that hunters would hang the bait in a tree and kill the animal as it climbed.

Is the pard the same as the panther?

No. In the bestiary tradition the pard and the panther are separate beasts listed one after the other, and Isidore of Seville places the pard immediately after the panther in his account. Bartholomaeus Anglicus said the two barely differ except that the panther carries more white in its spots, while Solinus called pards a second kind of panther. The bestiaries nonetheless gave them distinct entries and opposite moral readings.