With the torso of a man and the lower body of a stallion, the centaur is among the most recognized of mythological creatures. To the ancient Greeks, centaurs weren’t fantasy. They were real…real dicks. With the notable exception of the virtuous centaur Chiron, sensible gods fearing ancient Greeks wouldn’t want anything to do with centaurs.

From the centaur point of view, humans, with all their nitpicky laws and social mores, were a buzzkill. Since humans cramped their free-wheeling lifestyle, centaurs lived far apart from humanity in the secluded wooded hills of Thessaly around Mount Pelion.

Long Live The Centaur

Stories of centaurs and the rest of what we call Greek Mythology stem from Greece’s Heroic age and were passed on for centuries by oral tradition until finally recorded, though not witnessed, by ancient Greece’s great poets and authors. Homer and Hesiod, who wrote about 700 BC, are the ones whose work famously survives, but they were surely not alone in their times, and many chroniclers followed them.

If not for their written work, alongside the physical evidence in surviving public and private artwork from the time when Greek Mythology was Greek religious belief, the rise of Christianity might have erased its memory as easily as it ended the oral tradition that preserved it among ordinary ancient Greeks for a thousand years.

One remnant of the Heroic Age that was too important and too ubiquitous to fade away was the story of the Centauromacy, which is a grandiose sounding name for what, from a few thousand years distance, looks a lot like a barroom brawl between humans and drunken centaurs, complete with beard pulling, ball kicking, assaulting each other with any object within arm’s reach (rock, tree branch, ceramic jug, etc.), and all the other dirty fighting that you might expect from a gang of horny Hell’s Angles on meth. The humans won, but just barely.

The Centauromacy

Imagery from the Centauromacy pops up all over ancient Greece as a decorative motif, which suggests its great cultural importance. Scenes of a man battling a centaur are painted on household items like vases, carved into the elegant burial sarcophagi of the wealthy, and adorn the walls of temples along their lofty rooflines.

The Centauromacy was depicted in thirty-two carved marble panels, each roughly 4.5 feet square, that spanned the entire western roofline of the Parthenon, arguably the most famous temple in the world, then and now, if not also the most important public building in Athens.

For the purposes of illustrating the Centauromacy, I offer photographs of some of those carvings or reproduction castings made therefrom, supplemented with sketches of them from 1643, accredited to the French draftsman Jacques Carrey. These sketches show their appearance before they were damaged in a catastrophic explosion that almost completely destroyed the Parthenon in 1687. Together, sketches and sculpture give you a pretty good picture of the violence and desperation of the fighting that left many dead and injured on both sides and trashed a royal palace.

A Wedding Fit for a King

The battle occurred at a royal wedding feast celebrating the marriage of Pirithous, King of the Lapith people, to Hippodamia. The human Lapiths and centaurs were both natives of Thessaly and actually kinfolk. A few years, write three photo captions
prior to the battle, shortly after being crowned King by his human subjects, Pirithous ceded Mount Pelion to the neighboring centaurs as a gesture of friendship.

There, the centaurs were left to their own devices, far away from humans, free to romp, fight, and mate with Magnesian mares as they pleased. King Pirithous, on the occasion of his wedding, invited the high ranking among his centaur neighbors to attend to show his respect and peaceful posture toward them. The centaurs accepted the invitation in good faith and showed decorum at the start of the festivities.

However, it appears that the diplomacy of King Pirithousfailed to take into account that centaurs can’t hold their liquor and have a strong sexual attraction to humans. Copious wine and beautiful noblewomen invited temptation in human men of restrained habits. For the naturally wild centaurs, the combination proved disastrous.

Wedding Crashers

The centaurs, unfamiliar with the effects of intoxicating drink and the discipline of moderation, imbibed too much and lost what minimal inhibitions they possessed. All traces of civility disappeared when the centaur Eurytion, filled with lust for Hippodamia, suddenly grabbed the bride in his arms and forcibly tried to carry her off to have his way with her. Many other centaurs immediately followed his lead, snatching up the screaming and fleeing women and young boys they most desired to rape. The Lipith noblemen in attendance tried to stop the centaurs, but without their weapons and armor, many got a serious beat down from the larger, stronger centaurs.

The 1643 drawings of the Parthenon carvings reveal what damage to the artwork has partly concealed. The centaurs fought hard with both their human arms and horse front hooves, using the latter to trample the fallen to death and, worse still, target the testicles of the brave Lipithmen apposing their centaur freak off. Sexually aroused, drunk, and physically powerful, the centaurs might have won the battle had only ordinary high-born noblemen been present. That was not the case. Among the human guests were some genuine badasses of the Heroic Age.

Centaurs and Minotaurs

It so happened that Thesius, who was famous as the adventurer who stalked and killed the deadly Minotaur within its own Labyrinth before he became King of Athens, was present to see his good friend Pirithous married. Nestor, one of Jason’s Argonauts who fought in the quest for the Golden Fleece, was there too. Their combat prowess helped tip the scales in favor of the humans, causing the surviving centaurs to flee for their lives and leave Thessaly.

Dating around 450 B.C., the portrayal of the Centauromacy on the Parthenon leans toward a more desperate and undecided struggle. Other depictions, like the carving on the marble sarcophagus included in this story, clearly show the Lipith men dominating the wild centaurs. The Centauromacy eventually symbolized the Greeks’ struggle to maintain civilization, reason, and discipline against the destructive forces of barbarism, animal instinct, and hedonism. A deeper interpretation views that struggle constantly playing out inside the individual man.

Exactly what the ancient Greeks drew from the Centauromacy over time is difficult to pin down because of its long-lasting influence. At the very least, it stands as an extreme example of why you shouldn’t invite relatives who misbehave to your family gatherings.