Everything you ever wanted to know about unicorns but were afraid to ask
Unicorns are notoriously hard to catch - which is probably why we see
so few of them. In the 7th century the scholarly Spanish archbishop
Isidore of Seville described why: 'The unicorn is too strong to be
caught by hunters, except by a trick: if a virgin girl is placed in
front of a unicorn and she bares her breast to it, all of its
fierceness will cease and it will lay its head on her bosom, and thus
quieted is easily caught.' Leonardo da Vinci agreed. He said virgins
made them forget their ferocity. Virgins can do that.
The ancient Greeks believed they originally came from Indi, and
everyone including Ctesias, Aristotle and Strabo wrote about them.
They are described by the Roman Pliny the Elder in the Natural History
as 'the fiercest animal, and it is said that it is impossible to
capture one alive. It has the body of a horse, the head of a stag, the
feet of an elephant, the tail of a boar, and a single black horn three
feet long in the middle of its forehead. Its cry is a deep bellow.' No
mention of rainbows, though…
Cave drawings of unicorns have been found all over the world, from
France to South Africa and South America. Unicorns get about.
Julius Caesar said he saw one in a forest in Germany during his
conquest of Gaul, and Marco Polo said he saw one too, but that one
turned out to be a rhinoceros. Disappointing.
