Lucretius disproved centaurs with growth rates: a three-year-old horse outpaces a toddler
Half human, half horse, the centaur has galloped from Greek myth into medieval bestiaries, heraldry and modern fantasy. In the first century BC the poet Lucretius dismissed it on biological grounds: at three a horse is in its prime while a child is barely out of babyhood, so no single body could combine them.
Greek myth placed centaurs in the mountains of Thessaly, around Mount Pelion, and in parts of Elis and Laconia, as creatures wild as unbroken horses. The usual origin story makes them children of Ixion and Nephele, a cloud Zeus shaped to look like Hera to expose Ixion's desire for her. The name kentauros is of obscure origin; an ancient rationalising writer, Palaephatus, proposed piercing bull and imagined mounted archers clearing a plague of bulls.
The most popular modern explanation is historical. People from a culture without horse riding, like the Minoan Aegean, may have seen mounted nomads as single hybrid beings. The Spanish chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo reported that the Aztecs made just this mistake about Spanish cavalry. Fittingly, Greek writers credited the Lapiths, the centaurs' mythical kin in Thessaly, with inventing horse riding.
Centaurs embody two opposite ideas. They are untamed nature at its worst in the Centauromachy, the brawl that broke out when they tried to carry off the Lapith women at the wedding of Pirithous, until Theseus tipped the fight; Phidias carved it on the Parthenon metopes and Michelangelo sculpted it in relief. Yet the centaur Chiron was a revered teacher. Archaic Greek artists could not even agree on anatomy: one type joined a human torso at the horse's withers, which became standard, while another attached horse hindquarters to a full human body.
Similar hybrids appear far from Greece: the Kinnaras of Indian art, Polkan in Russian folk prints, and possibly figures on a Kalibangan seal from the Indus Valley dated around 2600 to 1900 BC, though some read those creatures as part tiger. A centaur holding a bow is a sagittary in heraldry. Dante stationed centaurs led by Chiron as guards in the seventh circle of his Inferno, and a University of Tennessee library displays a fake centaur skeleton built from a human and a Shetland pony to teach students scepticism.
Source: Centaur
