The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII-XV

We learn from Diodorus Siculus, and other ancient authors, that the people of Thessaly, and those especially who lived near Mount Pelion, were the first who trained horses for riding, and used them as a substitute for chariots. Pliny the Elder says that they excelled all the other people of Greece in horsemanship, and that they carried it to such perfection, that the name of ἱππεὺς, ‘a horseman,’ and that of ‘Thessalian,’ became synonymous. Again, the Thessalians, from their dexterity in killing the wild bulls that infested the neighbouring mountains, sometimes with darts or spears, and at other times in close engagement, acquired the name of Hippocentaurs, that is, ‘horsemen that hunted bulls,’ or simply κένταυροι, ‘Centaurs.’

It is not improbable that, because the Thessalians began to practise riding in the reign of Ixion, the poets made the Centaurs his sons; and they were said to have a cloud for their mother, which Jupiter put in the place of Juno, to baulk the attempt of Ixion on her virtue, because, according to Palæphatus, many of them lived in a city called Nephele, which, in Greek, signifies a cloud. As another method of accounting for their alleged descent from a cloud, it has been suggested that the Centaurs were a rapacious race of men, who ravaged the neighbouring country: that those who wrote the first accounts of them, in the ancient dialect of Greece, gave them the name of Nephelim, (the epithet of the giants of Scripture,) many Phœnician words having been imported in the early language of that country; and that in later times, finding them called by this name, the Greek word Nephelè, signifying ‘a cloud,’ persons readily adopted the fable that they were born of one.

The Centaurs being the descendants of Centaurus, the son of Ixion, and Pirithoüs being also the son of Ixion, by Dia, the former, declared war against Pirithoüs, asserting, that, as the descendants of Ixion, they had a right to share in the succession to his dominions. This quarrel, however, was made up, and they continued on friendly terms, until the attempt of Eurytus, or Eurytion, on Hippodamia, the bride of Pirithoüs, which was followed by the consequences here described by Ovid. The Centaurs are twice mentioned in the Iliad as φῆρες, or ‘wild beasts,’ and once under the name of ‘Centaurs.’ Pindar is the first writer that mentions them as being of a twofold form, partly man, and partly horse. In the twenty-first Book of the Odyssey, line 295, Eurytion is said to have had his ears and nose cut off by way of punishment, and that, from that period, ‘discord arose between the Centaurs and men.’

Buttman, (Mythologus, ii. p. 22, as quoted by Mr. Keightley), says that the names of Centaurs and Lapithæ are two purely poetic names, used to designate two opposite races of men,—the former, the rude horse-riding tribes, which tradition records to have been spread over the north of Greece: the latter, the more civilized race, which founded towns, and gradually drove their wild neighbours back into the mountains. He thinks xii. 536-541. that the explanation of the word ‘Centaurs,’ as ‘Air-piercers,’ (from κεντεῖν τὴν αὔραν) not an improbable one, for the idea is suggested by the figure of a Cossack leaning forward with his protruded lance as he gallops along. But he regards the idea of κένταυρος, having been in its origin simply κέντωρ, as much more probable, [it meaning simply ‘the spurrer-on.’] Lapithæ may, he thinks, have signified ‘Stone persuaders,’ from λᾶας πείθειν, a poetic appellation for the builders of towns. He supposes Hippodamia to have been a Centauress, married to the prince of the Lapithæ, and thus accounts for the Centaurs having been at the wedding. Mr. Keightley, in his ‘Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy,’ remarks that ‘it is certainly not a little strange that a rude mountain race like the Centaurs should be viewed as horsemen; and the legend which ascribes the perfecting of the art of horsemanship to the Lapithæ, is unquestionably the more probable one. The name Centaur, which so much resembles the Greek verb κεντέω, ‘to spur,’ we fancy gave origin to the fiction. This derivation of it is, however, rather dubious.’

After the battle here described, the Centaurs retreated to the mountains of Arcadia. The Lapithæ pursuing them, drove them to the Promontory of Malea in Laconia, where, according to Apollodorus, Neptune took them into his protection. Servius and Antimachus, as quoted by Comes Natalis, say that some of them fled to the Isle of the Sirens (or rather to that side of Italy which those Nymphs had made their abode); and that there they were destroyed by the voluptuous and debauched lives they led.

The fable of Cæneus, which Ovid has introduced, is perhaps simply founded on the prodigious strength and the goodness of the armour of a person of that name. The story of Halyonome killing herself on the body of Cyllarus, may possibly have been handed down by tradition. It is not unlikely that, if the Centaurs were horsemen, their women were not unacquainted with horsemanship; indeed, representations of female Centaurs are given, on ancient monuments, as drawing the chariot of Bacchus.