But the list of ancient species of Centaur does not really stop here.
No other compounds of the word Centaur may exist, but none the less
there were other Centaurs--other creatures, that is, of mixed human
and animal form. Chief among these were the Satyrs, who as pourtrayed
by early Greek art might equally well have been called ‘hippocentaurs,’
and in the presentations of Greco-Roman art deserved the name, if I
may coin it, of ‘tragocentaurs.’ And the Greeks themselves recognised
this fact. ‘The evidence of the coins of Macedonia,’ says Miss Jane
Harrison[620], ‘is instructive. On the coins of Orreskii, a centaur, a
horse-man, bears off a woman in his arms. At Lete close at hand, with
a coinage closely resembling in style, fabric, weight the money of the
Orreskii and other Pangaean tribes, the type is the same in _content_,
though with an instructive difference of form--a naked Satyr or
Seilenos with the hooves, ears and tail of a horse seizes a woman round
the waist.... This interchange of types, Satyr and Centaur, is evidence
about which there can be no mistake. Satyr and Centaur, slightly
diverse types of the horse-man, are in essence one and the same.’
Nor was the recognition of this fact confined to Macedonia. A famous
picture by Zeuxis, representing the domestic life of Centaurs, with a
female Centaur (a creature about as rare as a female Callicantzaros)
suckling her young, pourtrayed her in most respects, apart from her
sex, conventionally, but gave her the ears of a Satyr[621]. And
reversely Nonnus ventured to describe the ‘shaggy Satyrs’ as being, ‘by
blood, of Centaur-stock[622].’ In view then of this close bond between
the two types of half-human half-animal creatures, it would be natural
that, when the specific name Satyr was lost, as it has been lost, from
the popular language, while the generic term Centaur survived in the
form Callicantzaros, the Satyrs should have been amalgamated with those
who from of old had professed and called themselves Centaurs; and with
the Satyrs, I suppose, went also the Sileni.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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