The Immortal Sea-Goat
Pricus is described as an immortal sea-goat, a creature with the upper body of a goat and the lower body and tail of a fish. In the tales told about him he is the father and progenitor of the entire race of sea-goats, and he is bound up with the origins of the constellation Capricorn, the sea-goat that hangs among the stars. His name is not that of a great Olympian or a familiar figure from the heroic epics; rather, he belongs to the quieter world of star lore, where the shapes of the constellations are explained through short mythological stories.
In this tradition Pricus is said to have been created by Cronus, the Titan associated with time. Because his maker was the lord of time, Pricus is given a share in that same power, an ability to reach back and turn the hours in on themselves. This link between the sea-goat and the manipulation of time sits at the very heart of his story.
A Late and Obscure Figure
It is important to be clear about where Pricus comes from. He is an extremely obscure figure who does not appear in the major classical authors. Homer and Hesiod do not mention him, and he is not part of the well-known body of Greek myth preserved by the great poets and mythographers of antiquity. Instead, Pricus is known almost entirely from late retellings and from popular astrological and star-lore sources, where he serves as an explanatory tale for the sign and constellation of Capricorn. Readers should therefore treat his story as a piece of constellation lore rather than as a securely attested classical myth. The rich, emotional narrative usually attached to his name owes more to later and modern storytelling than to any early Greek text.
Pricus and His Children
The story, as it is commonly told, turns on the nature of Pricus's children, the sea-goats. Like their father they had the body of a goat and the tail of a fish, and they were intelligent creatures who could reason and speak. Their gift, however, carried a hidden danger. Whenever the sea-goats left the water and ventured onto the land, they were transformed into ordinary goats. As they lost their fishlike tails they also lost their reason, their speech, and their memory, becoming dumb animals with no recollection of what they had been.
The Turning Back of Time
Pricus, watching his children wander toward the shore and change into mindless beasts, was filled with grief. Using the power over time given to him by his creator, he turned back the hours again and again, undoing each moment in which a sea-goat crawled onto the land, so that his children never reached the shore and never lost themselves. Yet however often he reversed time, he could not hold his offspring in the sea forever. The sea-goats longed for the land and were drawn to it, and each turning of the clock only delayed what they themselves desired.
At last Pricus understood that he could not keep his children beside him, and that they had to be free to live their own lives on land, even at the cost of their reason and their memory. He let them go. Left utterly alone in the sea, immortal and unable to die, he was overcome by sorrow. Because death was denied him, he begged the heavens to release him from his grief, and his plea was answered when he was set among the stars.
Capricorn
In this way Pricus became the constellation Capricorn, the sea-goat fixed forever in the night sky. The image of a creature that is half goat and half fish is genuinely old, and the sea-goat form of Capricorn has deep roots in Greek and, still earlier, in Babylonian tradition, where a goat-fish was associated with the constellation. The tender story of Pricus and his lost children, however, is best understood as a later narrative woven around that ancient star image, giving a name and a father to the sea-goats who swim across the heavens.