Centaurs- Greek RaceRace"Cloud-Born"

Origin of the Race

Ixion, king of the Lapiths of Thessaly, was the first mortal to murder a kinsman: he killed his father-in-law by pushing him into a pit of burning coals. No god or mortal would purify him of the pollution until Zeus himself cleansed Ixion and invited him to dine on Olympus.

Ixion repaid this mercy by lusting after Hera. Zeus, suspecting his guest's intentions, shaped a cloud into the perfect likeness of his wife and placed it in Ixion's path. The king lay with the cloud-phantom, Nephele, believing he held the queen of heaven. From this union was born Centaurus, a creature rejected by gods and humans alike. Centaurus wandered to the slopes of Mount Pelion, where he mated with the Magnesian mares. Their offspring were the centaurs: human from the waist up, horse below, wild as the mountains they roamed.

Zeus bound Ixion to a fiery wheel that spins through the sky forever.

The Centauromachy

The centaurs and the Lapiths were kin through Ixion, and when the Lapith king Pirithous married Hippodamia, he invited the centaurs to the feast. When the centaurs tasted wine, their nature overcame them. The centaur Eurytion seized the bride herself and tried to carry her off. Others grabbed at the Lapith women and boys.

Theseus and Pirithous led the Lapiths against the drunken centaurs. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, the fighting fills the wedding hall: a centaur smashes a Lapith's face with a mixing bowl; another tears an oak from the ground and swings it like a club. The Lapiths drove the surviving centaurs from Thessaly. Greek sculptors carved the battle on the metopes of the Parthenon and the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia.

Chiron and Pholus

Not all centaurs were savage. Chiron was not descended from Ixion but from the Titan Kronos and the Oceanid Philyra. Kronos had taken the form of a horse to pursue her, and Chiron was born with the same hybrid body as his fellow centaurs but none of their wildness. From his cave on Mount Pelion he educated generations of heroes.

Pholus was gentler than most of his kin but still half-wild. When he entertained guests, he served them cooked meat while eating his own raw.

Heracles and the Centaurs

During his fourth labor, Heracles stopped to visit Pholus in his cave near Mount Erymanthos. When Heracles grew thirsty, Pholus hesitated to open a great jar of wine that belonged to all the centaurs. Heracles opened it himself. The wine's scent spread across the mountain and drew the other centaurs, maddened, to the cave.

Heracles drove them off with arrows dipped in the Hydra's blood. The wounded centaurs fled in all directions. Some sought refuge with Chiron on Mount Pelion, and Heracles, pursuing them, shot Chiron in the knee. The Hydra's venom was incurable even for the healer who had taught Asclepius, and Chiron chose to surrender his immortality rather than live in agony forever.

Pholus died that same day. While burying the dead centaurs, he pulled an arrow from a corpse and turned it over in his hands, puzzled that so small a thing could kill so large a creature. It slipped and scratched his foot. The venom killed him at once.

Nessus and the Death of Heracles

The centaur Nessus ferried travelers across the river Evenus on his back. When Heracles arrived with his wife Deianira, he swam across himself but trusted Nessus to carry her.

Midstream, Nessus tried to assault Deianira. She screamed. Heracles, already on the far bank, shot him with a poisoned arrow. As Nessus lay dying, he whispered to Deianira that his blood would work as a love charm: if Heracles's devotion ever waned, she should anoint a garment with it to win him back. It was a lie. The blood carried the Hydra's venom.

Deianira kept it. Years later, jealous of Heracles's desire for the princess Iole, she sent him a robe soaked in Nessus's blood. The poison burned into his flesh. Unable to die, unable to bear the pain, Heracles built his own pyre on Mount Oeta and lit it. The centaurs were nearly gone by then. But a single centaur's dying whisper had killed the man who slaughtered them.