The Centaur is the most harmonious creature of fantastic zoology. ‘Biform’ it is called in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but its heterogeneous character is easily overlooked, and we tend to think that in the Platonic world of ideas there is an archetype of the Centaur as there is of the horse or the man. The discovery of this archetype took centuries; early archaic monuments show a naked man to whose waist the body and hind quarters of a horse are uncomfortably fixed. On the west façade of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, the Cen- taurs already stand on the legs of a horse, and from the place where the animal’s neck should start we find a human torso.
Centaurs were the offspring of Ixion, a king of Thessaly, and a cloud which Zeus had given the shape of Hera (or Juno); another version of the legend asserts that they were the offspring of Centaurus, Apollo’s son, and Stilbia; a third, that they were the fruit of a union of Centaurus with the mares of Magnesium. (It is said that centaur is derived from gandharva; in Vedic myth, the Gandharvas are minor gods who drive the horses of the sun.) Since the art of riding was unknown to the Greeks of Homeric times, it has been con- jectured that the first Scythian horseman they came across seemed to them all one with his horse, and it has also been alleged that the cavalry of the conquistadors were Centaurs to the Indians. A text quoted by Prescott runs as follows:
One of the riders fell off his horse; and the Indians, seeing the animal fall asunder, up to now having deemed the beast all one, were so filled with terror that they turned and fled, crying out to their comrades that the animal had made itself into two and wondering at this: wherein we
may detect the secret hand of God; since, had this not happened, they might have slaughtered all the Chris- tians.
But the Greeks, unlike the Indians, were familiar with the horse; it is more likely that the Centaur was a deliberate invention and not a confusion born of ignorance.
The best known of the Centaur fables is the one in which they battle with the Lapiths followed a quarrel at a marriage celebration. To the Centaurs wine was now a new ex- perience; in the midst of the banqueting an intoxicated Cen- taur insulted the bride and, overturning the tables, started the famous Centauromachy that Phidias, or a disciple of his, would carve on the Parthenon, that Ovid would com- memorate in Book XII of the Metamorphoses, and that would inspire Rubens. Defeated by the Lapiths, the Cen- taurs were forced to leave Thessaly. Hercules, in a second encounter with them, all but annihilated the race of Cen- taurs with his arrows.
Anger and rustic barbarism are symbolized in the Cen- taur, but Chiron, ‘the most righteous of the Centaurs’ (Iliad, XI, ), was the teacher of Achilles and Aesculapius, whom he instructed in the arts of music, hunting, and war, as well as medicine and surgery. Chiron stands out in Canto XII of the Inferno, generally known as the ‘Canto of the Centaurs’. The acute observations of Momigliano in his edition of the Commedia should interest the curious.
Pliny (VII, ) says he saw a Hippocentaur embalmed in honey that had been brought to Rome from Egypt in the reign of Claudius.
In the ‘Feast of the Seven Sages’, Plutarch humorously tells that one of the shepherds of Periander, a tyrant of Corinth, brought his master, in a leather pouch, a newborn creature that a mare had given birth to and whose face, neck, and arms were human while its body was that of a horse. It cried like a baby, and everyone thought it to be a frightening
omen. The sage Thales examined it, chuckled, and said to Periander that really he could not approve his herdsmen’s conduct.
In Book V of his poem De rerum natura, Lucretius de- clares the Centaur impossible since the equine species reaches maturity before the human, and at the age of three the Centaur would be a full-grown horse and a babbling child. The horse would die fifty years before the man.
Cerberus
If Hell is a house, the house of Hades, it is natural that it have its watchdog; it is also natural that this dog be fearful. Hesiod’s Theogony gives it fifty heads; to make things easier for the plastic arts, this number has been reduced and Cerberus’ three heads are now a matter of public record. Virgil speaks of its three throats; Ovid of its threefold bark; Butler compares the triple-crowned tiara of the Pope, who is Heaven’s doorman, with the three heads of the dog who is the doorman of Hell (Hudibras, IV, ). Dante lends it human characteristics which increase its infernal nature: a filthy black beard, clawed hands that in the lashing rain rip at the souls of the damned. It bites, barks, and bares its teeth.
Bringing Cerberus up into the light of day was the last of Hercules’ tasks. (‘He drow out Cerberus, the hound of helle,’ writes Chaucer in ‘The Monke’s Tale’.) Zachary Grey, an Eng- lish writer of the eighteenth century, in his commentary on Hudibras interprets the adventure in this way:
This Dog with three Heads denotes the past, the present, and the Time to come; which receive, and, as it were, devour all things. Hercules got the better of him, which shews that heroick Actions are always victorious over
Time, because they are present in the Memory of Pos- terity.
According to the oldest texts, Cerberus greets with his tail (which is a serpent) those entering into Hell, and tears to pieces those who try to get out. A later legend has him biting the newly arrived; to appease him a honeycake was placed in the coffin of the departed.
In Norse mythology, a blood-spattered dog, Garmr, keeps watch over the house of the dead and will fight against the gods when hell’s wolves devour the moon and sun. Some give this dog four eyes; the dogs of Yama, the Brahman god of death, also have four eyes.
Both Brahmanism and Buddhism offer hells full of dogs, which, like Dante’s Cerberus, are torturers of souls.