Catoblepas

The catoblepas (from Latin catōblepas, ultimately from Greek καταβλέπω (katablépō) "to look downwards") is a legendary creature from Aethiopia, first described by Pliny the Elder and later by Claudius Aelianus.

[1] Pliny the Elder (Natural History, 8.77) described the catoblepas as a mid-sized creature, sluggish, with a heavy head and a face always turned to the ground.

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, a scaly back and shaggy eyebrows.

It is not a very large animal, is sluggish in all its parts, and its head is so large that it carries it with difficulty, in such wise that it always droops towards the ground; otherwise it would be a great pest to man, for any one on whom it fixes its eyes dies immediately.In The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874), Gustave Flaubert describes it as: ... a black buffalo with the head of a hog, hanging close to the ground, joined to its body by a thin neck, long and loose as an emptied intestine.

It wallows flat upon the ground, and its legs are smothered under the huge mane of stiff bristles that hide its face.In The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (c. 1570–1586), by Sir Philip Sidney, the "forsaken knight" that Amphilalus fights has a Catoblepas upon his crest: So passed he over into the island, taking with him the two brothers of Anaxius; where he found the forsaken knight attired in his own livery, as black as sorrow itself could see itself in the blackest glass: his ornaments of the same hue, but formd into the figures of ravens which seemed to gape for carrion: only his reins were snakes, which finely wrapping themselves one within the other, their heads came together to the cheeks and bosses of the bit, where they might seem to bite at the horse, and the horse, as he champed the bit, to bite at them, and that the white foam was engendered by the poisonous fury of the combat.