The Centaurs

Ixion and the cloud

The Centaurs are creatures that are part man and part horse. The earliest surviving text to describe that shape outright is a poem by Pindar, his second Pythian ode, and it also tells how they were born.

Ixion is given a place at the table of the gods. There he tries to force himself on the goddess Hera. The god Zeus shapes a cloud in her likeness and lays it beside Ixion instead. Ixion brags about his conquest before the trick 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,” a mountain in Greece. In one line Pindar gives the result: a “marvellous horde” that “resembled both its parents, like the mother below, the father above” (Pythian 2.33-48).

Other tellings of their birth

Apollodorus, an ancient writer whose Library retells the Greek myths, tells the same descent in his Epitome, a shorter version of that book. He adds a detail Pindar leaves out. It is Hera who tells Zeus about Ixion’s attempt, and the cloud’s true nature is confirmed only after Ixion has boasted (Epitome 1.20).

Homer, who wrote generations before Pindar, never gives the Centaurs a horse’s body. In the Iliad he calls them mountain-dwelling pheres, an old word for “beasts”. That word does not settle what they looked like. The familiar joined body of man and horse appears clearly only in Pindar, where a trick played by a god produces a child who mates with the mares of Pelion.

Chiron and Pholus

The ancient sources set two Centaurs apart from the herd, and each comes from a different family again.

Pindar’s third Nemean ode, another of his poems, calls Chiron “the Centaur, son of Cronus.” It 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). So Chiron’s father is Cronus, not Ixion. His mother is Philyra, not a Thessalian mare.

Pholus is a third kind of Centaur. Apollodorus makes him “a son of Silenus by a Melian nymph,” a nymph being a female spirit of nature. Pholus lives in a cave on Pholoe, where he hosts the hero Heracles. He keeps a jar of wine that all the Centaurs own together (Library 2.5.4).

The wedding of Peirithous

The war between the Centaurs and the Lapiths begins at a wedding, in the sources that give it a cause at all. The Lapiths are the people of the groom, Peirithous. The sources tell two versions of what goes wrong.

Homer’s Odyssey blames one guest. Eurytion, “made foolish with wine” at the feast of Peirithous, attacks the household. The Lapiths cut off his ears and nose and drive him from the hall. The Odyssey makes this one guest’s violence the start of the feud between Centaurs and humans.

Apollodorus, in his Epitome, blames the whole party. Peirithous invites the Centaurs to his wedding to Hippodamia because they are her own relatives. It is all of them, “unaccustomed to wine,” who try to violate the bride once they are drunk. The hero Theseus fights beside Peirithous and, in Apollodorus’s own words, “killed many of them” (Epitome 1.21).

The battle on the Parthenon

The battle that follows is the Centauromachy, the war of Centaurs and Lapiths. It was carved onto temples across Greece. Among them is the Parthenon in Athens, on its south metopes, the square carved panels that run along the temple above the columns. They were cut in 445 to 440 BC and are held today in the Acropolis Museum.

Metope 1 shows a Centaur gripping a Lapith by the neck. The Lapith drives his spear into the Centaur’s belly. In the stone, the outcome of the fight is still undecided.

Chiron driven from the mountain

Pelion is where the Centaurs are born. In Apollodorus it is also where Chiron lives, until the Lapiths drive him out. He goes to Malea, a different mountain at the southern tip of the Peloponnese.

Years later, Heracles wounds him there by accident. Centaurs gather to attack Pholus’s cave, and Heracles fights them off. One of his arrows passes through a Centaur’s arm and sticks in Chiron’s knee. The arrow is poisoned with the blood of the Hydra, so the wound cannot be cured. Because Chiron is immortal, it cannot kill him either. Apollodorus has him go back 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, as part of an exchange. Heracles wants to free Prometheus from his punishment. He presents Chiron to Zeus, and Chiron, “though immortal, consented to die in his stead” (Library 2.5.11).