Lupus is a southern constellation, one of Ptolemy's forty-eight, now understood as a wolf but anciently regarded simply as an unspecified wild beast, the Therion, held or speared by the neighbouring Centaurus. In the old imagery the centaur carries the animal toward the altar, Ara, as if for sacrifice, and the three figures form a small scene in the southern sky. It lies within the band of the Milky Way and holds several star clusters, though it has no very bright stars. In astronomical tradition the constellation is a pattern of stars rather than a zodiac sign. These are the features of Lupus as the classical and modern traditions describe it, distinct from any astrological reading of the region; its identity shifted from a generic beast to a wolf only in the later, post-classical naming of the figure.
Lupus is hemmed in by two of Lacaille's 1750s instrument constellations, Norma, the carpenter's level or square, and Circinus, the compasses, both carved from faint stars in the same general region, part of the systematic eighteenth-century project of naming every remaining unclaimed patch of the southern sky after the tools of contemporary science and craft. The shift from a generic wild beast to a specifically identified wolf is part of a broader pattern in constellation history, in which later European astronomers and cartographers frequently sharpened vague classical descriptions into more specific, named animals as the tradition was repeatedly redrawn and reprinted.