Featured From Lydia, Philadelphia: Dionysos and a spotted "panther"

At last had time to read through this thread and found it very interesting Thanks all.

 

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That seems to be a reasonable summary of my position! Although I do have one slight quibble, about this statement:

I don't think they were aware of any big cats that fell into this category -- "any big cat that wasn't a lion or tiger, spotted or with melanism" -- other than leopards, if one defines leopards to include so-called "black panthers". Which would make leopards and panthers synonyms, rather than leopards being a subset of panthers. Although I doubt that the Greeks and Romans really understood that black panthers were a kind of leopard (assuming that "leopard" was a word they used.) In which case, from their viewpoint, the category of "leopards" did not include black panthers, and it was true that spotted leopards and what we call black panthers were two different animals falling under the broader category of "panther" -- a category meaning "big cats that aren't lions or tigers." I don't know if they had a separate word for "black panthers," or simply called them "panthers."

Perhaps more importantly, I don't think we really even know what an ancient Greek or Roman looking at a coin depicting a spotted leopard or black panther would have called the animal. I suspect that calling them all "panthers," even when the animal is covered with spots, may be a convention that dates only to the 1500s-1700s rather than to ancient times, especially if the ancients did generally use the word "leopard" for spotted big cats. In which case, there's even less of a good reason to hold to that convention -- and the confusion that necessarily results from its use -- rather than using modern terminology.