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The Centaurs are said by Virgil and Horace to have dwelt in Thessaly, a land then greatly famed for its breed of horses. Instances, as in the landing of the Spaniards in America, have not been unknown where those to whom the horse was unknown have imagined that the horse and his rider were but one creature. The belief in centaurs is not, therefore, so difficult a myth to trace to its origin
as many others. The usual form of representation is the conjoining of the body and legs of a horse and the head, arms, and body of a man so far as the waist, though in some early works, as, for example, in archaic pottery in the British Museum, the legs of the man take the place of the fore-legs of the horse. The celebrated statue in the Louvre known as the Borghese Centaur, a sculpture of the most refined period of Greek art, gives the best idea, perhaps, of the highest treatment the, form permits. Other fine examples, fragments of the sculpture of the Parthenon, may be seen in our own national collection in London.* In the works of the earlier writers, as Homer, the centaurs have nothing unnatural in their composition; we read nothing of their being half-horse, half-man, but they are introduced to us as a tribe of men whose home was in the mountains and whose nature was altogether barbarous and ferocious., The contests with centaurs, so favourite a subject in Greek art, have been generally conceived to be the struggle of Greek civilisation with the barbarism of the tribes with which it came in contact in the early Pelasgian period, a struggle that strangely enough finds its memorial not only in the grand sculptures of the matchless Parthenon, but in the delicate beauty of a little English wild flower, the pink centaury.t
Isidore refers to a creature called the Onocentaur, " which has the shape of a man down to the waist, and behind has the make of an ass." As the centaurs are frequently represented as bearing bows and arrows, the Sagittarius of the heralds (such, for instance, as that assigned as the armorial bearing of ping Stephen or the sign of the Zodiac of the same name) is ordinarily represented in this half-human, half-equine form, though it is, of course, obvious on a moment's consideration of the real meaning and derivation of the word, that this is but a narrow and arbitrary limitation, and that Robin Hood, for example, or William Tell, to say nothing of " A, the archer that shot at a frog," might as readily, in fact, be called a Sagittarius as any Thessalian centaur. |