Centaurs
animal · 4 works · 4 mentions · 5 anchored passages
also in the atlas: Centaurs the group
four-legged Centaurs
in the texts
Heracles
Half-human, half-horse creatures whom Heracles battled among his labors.
what did I not destroy, whether lions, or triple-bodied Typhons, or giants or the battle against the hosts of four-legged Centaurs?
De Rerum Natura
Mythological hybrid creature, half man half horse, used by Lucretius as the paradigm case of a biologically impossible hybrid.
That from a man and from the seed of horse,
The beast of draft, can Centaurs be composed
Creatures of twofold stock and double frame,
Phaedrus
Hybrid mythological creatures Socrates lists as further problems for anyone who insists on rationalizing every legend.
But I, Phaedrus, think such explanations are very pretty in general, but are the inventions of a very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable man, for no other reason than because after this he must explain the forms of the Centaurs, and then that of the Chimaera, and there presses in upon him a whole crowd of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegas, and multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures.
Agis and Cleomenes
Monstrous offspring of Ixion's union with the cloud-image of Hera, symbolizing the bastard products of glory-seeking.
Not without rhyme or reason is the supposition of some writers that the tale about Ixion—how it was the cloud that he embraced instead of Hera and begat from thence the Centaurs—has an application to lovers of glory.