The Lapiths

A fight in the hall of Peirithous

The Lapiths are a people of Thessaly, in the myths ruled by Peirithous. They are best known for their war with the Centaurs, beings who live on the mountains.

The Odyssey, the epic poem of Homer, tells how the feud began. A man named Antinous uses the story as a warning against drink. The Centaur Eurytion drinks too much in the hall of Peirithous and turns violent. The heroes gathered there cut off his ears and nose and drag him out through the doorway. Homer says the feud between Centaurs and men starts there.

Homer does not call the gathering a wedding feast. The poet Ovid does, in his much later poem the Metamorphoses. There Nestor tells the story. Peirithous marries Hippodame and invites the Centaurs, who were born from a cloud, to dine among the Lapiths. Eurytus, a Centaur, is driven wild by wine and by the sight of the bride, and he seizes her. Other Centaurs seize the women present, and the hall breaks out in fighting.

The wedding battle in Ovid

Ovid follows the deaths of one fighter after another across hundreds of lines. One of them is the attempt to kill Caeneus, who cannot be wounded, by burying him under tree trunks.

This battle is much later and far more detailed than Homer’s short warning. The two share a core: a breach of trust inside the household of Peirithous, followed by violence on all sides.

No source names Pelion as the place of the wedding. The mountain enters the story through what happened next, which Homer states outright: Peirithous drove the Centaurs off it. The Lapiths are more than that one act, though. They are also an older company of heroes, a force from Thessaly at Troy, and the people whose feast became one of the most retold battles of the ancient world.

Driven from Pelion

The Iliad, Homer’s epic of the war at Troy, lists the Greek forces in a passage called the Catalogue of Ships. It reaches back to the Lapiths through the son of Peirithous. Hippodamia gives birth to Polypoetes on the same day that Peirithous punishes the shaggy mountain beings. He drives them from Mount Pelion to the land of a people called the Aethices.

The passage names no wedding, even though the birth and the battle fall on the same day. Later accounts make Hippodamia the bride at the disastrous feast. Homer’s line settles what happened at the mountain: the victory of Peirithous removes the Centaurs from Pelion.

Apollodorus, an ancient writer who retold the myths, shows the same expulsion from the other side. In his story of the labours of the hero Heracles, Chiron, a Centaur, lives at Malea because the Lapiths drove him from Mount Pelion. The brief note sets Chiron apart from the Centaurs Heracles is fighting. It still confirms that the Lapiths changed where he lived.

The generation Nestor remembers

In the Iliad, the aged Nestor tries to end the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon, two of the Greek commanders. He names men who once listened to his advice: Peirithous, Dryas, Caeneus, Exadius, Polyphemus and Theseus. He calls them the strongest men of their time. They fought the strongest enemies, the mountain-dwelling beings Homer calls pheres.

Nestor does not tell of a wedding, or call every one of these men a Lapith. His list keeps a company of heroes centred on Peirithous and the war that later writers call the battle of Lapiths and Centaurs. His point is a comparison. The leaders at Troy should take advice, because greater men did so before them.

So the old war has an unusual place in the Iliad. It is not told for its own sake. It is the standard an old survivor holds up when a new army is close to breaking apart under the anger of its leaders.

The next generation at Troy

Polypoetes leads the men of Argissa, Gyrtone, Orthe, Elone and Oloosson to Troy. Leonteus, a grandson of Caeneus, commands beside him. Their force fills 40 ships. A son of Peirithous and a descendant of Caeneus lead men from Thessaly in the Greek army, a second generation of the earlier war.

Homer calls them Lapiths again when the Trojans attack the wall around the Greek ships. Polypoetes and Leonteus stand together at one gate. Polypoetes drives his spear through the helmet of Damasus and kills Pylon and Ormenus. Leonteus kills Hippomachus, Antiphates, Menon, Iamenus and Orestes.

The Lapiths are more than an old victory over the Centaurs. Their descendants remain a named fighting people in the war at Troy. The old battle gives them their fame, and the fight at the wall shows that fame under pressure.