The Centaurs

The wedding where hospitality collapses

Eurytion drinks too much at the wedding of Peirithous and assaults the household. The Lapiths cut off his ears and nose and throw him outside. The Odyssey makes that single guest’s violence the beginning of the feud between Centaurs and humans. Apollodorus widens the blame: all the Centaurs become drunk, attack the bride and are driven into battle with Theseus fighting beside the groom.

Homer gives these enemies no horse’s body. He calls them mountain-dwelling pheres, beasts, a term that does not settle their anatomy. The familiar joined body appears clearly in Pindar, where an act of divine deception produces a child who mates with the mares of Pelion.

Ixion, the cloud, and the mares of Pelion

Pindar’s second Pythian ode is the earliest surviving text to settle the question Homer leaves open. Ixion, given a place at the gods’ own table, tries to force himself on Hera; Zeus shapes a cloud into her likeness and lays it beside him instead, and Ixion boasts of the conquest before the deception is found out. The cloud, “without the blessing of the Graces”, bears a son “honoured neither by men nor by the laws of the gods,” and names him Centaurus. Centaurus then mates “with the Magnesian mares in the foothills of Pelion,” and Pindar gives the result in one line: a “marvellous horde” that “resembled both its parents, like the mother below, the father above” (Pythian 2.33-48). Apollodorus’s Epitome tells the same descent, adding a detail Pindar leaves out: it is Hera who reports Ixion’s attempt to Zeus, and the cloud’s true nature is confirmed only after Ixion has already boasted of it (Epitome 1.20).

Chiron and Pholus, born a different way

Two Centaurs the ancient sources set apart from that herd, and each is descended differently again. Pindar’s third Nemean ode calls Chiron “the Centaur, son of Cronus,” and places the young Achilles at his door, “the home of Philyra,” bringing him the boars and lions he has killed since the age of six (Nemean 3.43-49). Cronus, not Ixion, is Chiron’s father; Philyra, not a Thessalian mare, is his mother. Pholus is a third kind of Centaur again: Apollodorus makes him “a son of Silenus by a Melian nymph,” host to Heracles at a cave on Pholoe and keeper of a wine jar the rest of the Centaurs hold in common (Library 2.5.4).

The battle cut onto the Parthenon

The war between the Centaurs and the Lapiths begins, in the sources that give it a cause at all, at a wedding. Homer’s Odyssey blames one guest: Eurytion, “made foolish with wine” at the feast of Peirithous, assaults the household outright, and the Lapiths cut off his ears and nose and drive him from the hall. Apollodorus’s Epitome widens the blame to the whole party: Peirithous invites the Centaurs to his wedding to Hippodamia because they are her own kinsmen, and it is all of them, “unaccustomed to wine,” who try to violate the bride once they are drunk; Theseus fights beside Peirithous and, in Apollodorus’s own words, “killed many of them” (Epitome 1.21). The battle that follows is the Centauromachy carved onto temples across Greece, among them the Parthenon’s south metopes, cut 445-440 BC and held today in the Acropolis Museum: metope 1 shows a Centaur gripping a Lapith by the neck as the Lapith drives his spear into the Centaur’s belly, the fight’s outcome still undecided in the stone.

Driven from the mountain

Pelion is not only where the Centaurs are born. It is also, in Apollodorus, where Chiron lives until the Lapiths drive him out, to Malea, a different mountain at the southern tip of the Peloponnese. It is there, years later, that Heracles wounds him by accident: fighting off the Centaurs who converge on Pholus’s cave, Heracles fires an arrow that passes through one Centaur’s arm and lodges in Chiron’s knee. The wound, poisoned with the Hydra’s blood, cannot be cured, and because Chiron is immortal it cannot kill him either. Apollodorus has him retreat to his cave, “and there he wished to die, but he could not, for he was immortal” (Library 2.5.4). Death comes to him only later, and only as an exchange: to free Prometheus from his own punishment, Heracles presents Chiron to Zeus, and Chiron, “though immortal, consented to die in his stead” (Library 2.5.11).