Nor is this artistic convention without parallel in ancient Greece. At Phigalea there was once, we are told, an ancient statue of Demeter represented as a woman with the head and mane of a horse; and the explanation of this equine adjunct was that she had once assumed the form of a mare[657]. In other words, the power of transformation was indicated in art by a composite form. Hence indeed it is not unlikely that the very method which early artists adopted of indicating the Centaurs’ power to assume various single forms, being misunderstood by later generations among whom the Centaurs’ human origin and faculty of magical transformation were no longer predominant traditions, contributed not a little to the conception of Centaurs in an invariable composite form; and that later art, by blending the two incongruous elements into a more harmonious but less significant whole, confirmed men in that misunderstanding, until the old traditions became a piece of rare and local lore. Thus on three separate grounds--the analogy of world-wide superstition which attributes to sorcerers the power of assuming bestial form; the tendency detected in modern Greek folk-lore to replace beings of single shape, but capable of transforming themselves into other single shapes, by creatures of composite shape; and the contrast between the horse-centaurs of archaic art and those of the Parthenon--we are led to the same conclusion, namely that the Centaurs were a tribe of reputed sorcerers whose most striking manifestation of power, in the eyes of their Achaean neighbours, was to turn themselves into wild beasts. The name Pheres was then in truth a title of respect, a title in no way derogatory to the virtuous Chiron, who, if he exercised his magical powers chiefly in mercy and healing, shared doubtless with the other Centaurs the miraculous faculty of metamorphosis. Our first conclusion then concerning the Callicantzari, namely that they were originally men capable of turning into beasts, was no less correct than the second conclusion which showed them as the modern representatives of Dionysus’ attendant Satyrs and Sileni. Where the beliefs in their human origin and in their power of metamorphosis still prevail, Greek tradition has preserved not only the name but the essential character of the ancient Centaurs.