Lepus is a small southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, lying just beneath the feet of Orion the Hunter. It represents a hare, and the ancients fittingly placed it near Orion and his hunting dogs, as though the hare were being pursued across the sky; one tradition holds it flees before the greater dog, Canis Major, to the east. Its stars are modest, its brightest bearing the Arabic-derived name Arneb, meaning the hare. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a sign of the zodiac, and its lore is that of the celestial hunt gathered around Orion rather than of astrology. These are the features of Lepus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the sky in which it sits.
Immediately east of Lepus and Canis Major, filling a stretch of sky the ancient tradition left unmarked, sits Monoceros, the unicorn, introduced in the early seventeenth century and generally credited to Petrus Plancius or Jakob Bartsch; unlike Lepus, which Ptolemy catalogued in the second century, Monoceros carries no classical figure or myth behind it at all, its unicorn drawn from the heraldic and emblematic imagination of early modern Europe rather than from antiquity.