Centaur

• 1. Introduction

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  Centaurs are creatures from Greek mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body and legs of a horse. They were said to roam the mountains of Thessaly, a region in northern Greece, and their name in Greek, kentauros, is of obscure origin. What were these beings, exactly? Where did the idea of them come from? And why, thousands of years after the myths were first told, do centaurs still appear in art, literature, and popular storytelling? This documentary traces the centaur from its murky mythological birth through its many artistic and literary lives, stopping along the way at a Bronze Age tomb, a relief carved by Michelangelo, and the library of a modern American university.

• 2. Who Made the Centaurs

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  Ixion, a mortal king, desired Hera, the queen of the gods, and Zeus set a trap for him. He fashioned a cloud, Nephele, in Hera's image, and Ixion was deceived. From his union with Nephele, the centaurs were born. That is the most common version of the creation myth, and it gives the centaurs their collective name: the Ixionidae, meaning the children of Ixion.

  A second version traces their ancestry one generation further, through a figure called Centaurus. Centaurus was described as a deformed man who mated with the Magnesian mares. He was either the son of Ixion and Nephele himself, or the son of the god Apollo and a nymph named Stilbe. In that second telling, Centaurus had a twin brother, Lapithes, who became the ancestor of the Lapiths. That kinship between centaurs and Lapiths, established at the very moment of creation, made their later war against each other carry a particular weight.

  Not all centaurs shared this Thessalian lineage. According to the poet Nonnus, a separate tribe lived on Cyprus, fathered by Zeus. Unlike the mainland centaurs, the Cyprian variety were ox-horned. A third group, the Lamian Pheres, were twelve rustic spirits associated with the Lamos river. Zeus set them to guard the infant god Dionysus against the schemes of Hera, but the goddess turned them into ox-horned centaurs as punishment. These Lamian centaurs later marched with Dionysus in his campaign against the Indians, carrying their divine origin into a military expedition far from Greece.

• 3. The Centauromachy

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  Hippodamia's wedding day turned into one of the most famous battles in Greek myth. She was marrying Pirithous, king of the Lapithae and a son of Ixion, when the centaurs attempted to carry off Hippodamia and the other Lapith women. The battle is known as the Centauromachy, and it is frequently described as a symbolic conflict between civilization and barbarism. The hero Theseus, a founder of cities who happened to be present at the wedding, tipped the balance by fighting alongside Pirithous. The centaurs were driven off or destroyed.

  Among the Lapiths fighting that day was a hero named Caeneus, who was invulnerable to weapons. The centaurs could not cut him down, so they resorted to beating him into the earth with rocks and the branches of trees. That detail stuck in the Greek imagination: the centaurs were creatures who solved a problem they could not otherwise overcome by using the raw materials of the natural world.

  Phidias carved the Centauromachy into the metopes of the Parthenon, giving the battle one of its most enduring images. Michelangelo also took it as a subject, in a relief called the Battle of the Centaurs. Elizabeth Lawrence, in her article "The Centaur: Its History and Meaning in Human Culture," argues that the Lapith-centaur contests stand for the contest between civilization and barbarism. Dante, writing in the 14th century, placed centaurs in his Inferno as guardians; in Canto XII, Chiron and Pholus lead a band along the bank of the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood in the seventh circle of Hell.

• 4. Where the Myth Came From

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  The most widely accepted theory about the centaur's origin links the myth to the shock of first encountering mounted riders. In the Minoan Aegean world, people had no tradition of riding horses, and the theory suggests that a horseman might have appeared to them as a single creature, half human and half animal. The chronicler Bernal Diaz del Castillo recorded that the Aztecs had the same initial misapprehension when they first saw Spanish cavalrymen.

  The Lapiths of Thessaly are relevant here. Greek writers described them as the inventors of horse-riding, and the Thessalian tribes also claimed their horse breeds were descended from the centaurs themselves. That double connection, the Lapiths as both kinsmen of the centaurs and as the people who first tamed horses, suggests the myth was encoding a memory of what horsemanship looked like to those who had never seen it.

  Robert Graves drew on the work of Georges Dumezil, who traced the centaurs back to the Indian Gandharva, to propose a different theory. Graves speculated that the centaurs were a dimly remembered pre-Hellenic fraternal earth cult that used the horse as a totem. Mary Renault wove a similar idea into her novel The Bull from the Sea.

  As for the name itself, one ancient rationalist attempt at an etymology comes from Palaephatus, whose text On Incredible Tales proposed that kentauros derived from ken and tauros, meaning "piercing bull." Palaephatus grounded this in a story about mounted archers from a village called Nephele who wiped out a herd of bulls terrorizing Ixion's kingdom. Another proposed etymology was simply "bull-killer." Scholars have judged the proposed Semitic etymologies as far-fetched.

• 5. Centaurs in Stone and Paint

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  Two fragmentary Mycenaean terracotta figures found at Ugarit have been tentatively identified as centaurs, pointing toward a Bronze Age origin for the myth. A painted terracotta centaur was also found in the Hero's tomb at Lefkandi. By the Geometric period, centaurs were among the first representational figures painted on Greek pottery. A Geometric period bronze showing a warrior face-to-face with a centaur is now held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Professor Paul Baur identified three distinct forms in Archaic Greek art. Class A centaurs show a human torso attached to the horse's body at the withers, where the neck would be; this form eventually became the standard. Class B centaurs join a full human body and legs at the waist to the hindquarters of a horse, and images of both classes sometimes appear together in the same work. Class C centaurs, which Baur identifies with Aeolic art, have human forelegs that end in hooves rather than feet. Some paintings on amphorae and Dipylon cups also depict winged centaurs, a variant that falls outside all three classes.

  Roman artists kept centaurs in circulation as well. A notable example is the Great Cameo of Constantine, dated to around AD 314-16, which shows a pair of centaurs drawing the chariot of the emperor Constantine the Great and his family. The imagery is entirely pagan, and sits in sharp contrast to the familiar picture of Constantine as the patron of early Christianity.

  Centaurs also appeared on Pictish carved stones from north-east Scotland, erected in the 8th-9th centuries AD at sites including Meigle in Perthshire. These stones lie well outside the Roman Empire's reach, yet the depictions appear to derive from Classical prototypes.

• 6. Variations and Relatives

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  Female centaurs, called centaurides or centauresses, do not appear in early Greek literature or art. A Macedonian mosaic from the 4th century BC is one of the earliest known images of a centauress. The poet Ovid names one: Hylonome, who killed herself after her husband Cyllarus died fighting the Lapiths.

  Analogous figures appear across cultures far from Greece. The Kalibangan cylinder seal, dated to around 2600-1900 BC and found at a site of the Indus Valley civilization, shows a battle between men in the presence of centaur-like creatures, though some scholars read those figures as half human and half tiger. The Kinnaras of Indian mythology are half man and half horse, depicted in ancient texts and sculptures across the subcontinent; their form differs slightly from the Greek centaur, placing the human torso where a horse's head would be.

  In Russia, a centaur-like figure called Polkan appeared in folk art and lubok prints from the 17th through the 19th centuries. Polkan's origin is unexpected: the figure traces back to Pulicane, a half-dog character in the Italian poem I Reali di Francia by Andrea da Barberino, which circulated in prose translations in the Slavonic world.

  In medieval European heraldry, a centaur holding a bow is called a sagittary or sagittarius. The arms attributed to Stephen, King of England, featured three lion-centaur sagittaries, and from that device he became known as "The Sagittary of London Park."

• 7. Literature's Long Reach

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  The Roman poet Lucretius, writing in the first century BC, took the unusual step of arguing against the centaur's biological possibility. In his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things, he pointed out that horses reach the prime of their life at three years, while humans at the same age are still barely more than babies. Growth rates alone, he argued, made a hybrid animal impossible.

  In the Middle Ages, Jerome's version of the Life of St Anthony the Great, originally written by Athanasius of Alexandria, sent the hermit monk Anthony on an encounter with a centaur who challenged him, only to be forced to admit that the old gods had been overthrown. The painter Stefano di Giovanni, known as Sassetta, depicted this encounter repeatedly in The Meeting of St Anthony Abbot and St Paul the Hermit. Centaurs also preserved a Dionysian connection in the 12th-century Romanesque carved capitals of Mozac Abbey in the Auvergne, alongside depictions of harvesters and boys riding goats.

  Modern literature has shown no interest in retiring the creature. C.S. Lewis portrayed centaurs in The Chronicles of Narnia as wise and courageous, skilled in astronomy and medicine. John Updike's 1963 novel The Centaur set a Pennsylvania town against the template of the centaur myth, with a local schoolteacher standing in for Chiron. In the Harry Potter series, centaurs inhabit the Forbidden Forest near Hogwarts, known for archery, healing, and astrology. Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series splits the difference between the centaur's two natures: most of his centaurs are wild party-goers, while Chiron serves as the responsible director of a demigod training facility.

  At the John C. Hodges library at the University of Tennessee, sculptor Bill Willers combined a human study skeleton with the skeleton of a Shetland pony to create an exhibit titled "Do you believe in Centaurs?". The exhibitors stated it was designed to mislead students, with the goal of making them more critically aware of what they accept as real.