In the name of common sense, did Peirithoös expel a storm-cloud or a mountain torrent and force it to leave Pelion and settle elsewhere? The vengeance of Peirithoös is simply the expulsion of one wild tribe by another. In these passages from the _Iliad_ the foes of Peirithoös are simply a tribe of wild men, Pheres. In the _Odyssey_, Homer[974] calls these same foes by the name Kentauri, and implies that they are _non_-human. Speaking of the peril of ‘honey-sweet wine’ he says: ‘Thence ’gan the feud ’twixt Centaurs and mankind.’ For the right understanding of this later non-humanity of the Centaurs the development of their art type is of paramount importance. * * * * * We are apt to think of the Centaurs exclusively somewhat as they appear on the metopes of the Parthenon, i.e. as splendid horses with the head and trunk of a man. By the middle of the fifth century B.C. in knightly horse-loving Athens the horse form had got the upper hand. In archaic representations the reverse is the case. The Centaurs are in art what they are in reality, men with men’s legs and feet, but they are shaggy mountain men with some of the qualities and habits of beasts; so to indicate this in a horse-loving country they have the hind-quarters of a horse awkwardly tacked on to their human bodies. A good example is the vase-painting in fig. 118 from an early black-figured lekythos in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Vases of this style cannot be dated later than the beginning of the sixth century B.C. and may be somewhat earlier[975]. The scene represented is the fight of Herakles with the Centaurs. To the left is a Centaur holding in his right hand a branch, the primitive weapon of a primitive combatant. He is figured as a complete man with a horse-trunk appended. In the original drawing the horse-trunk is made more obviously an extra appendage from the fact that the human body is painted red and the horse-trunk black. Herakles too is a fighter with rude weapons; he carries his club, which in this case is plainly what its Greek name indicates, a rough hewn trunk or branch or possibly root of a tree. The remainder of the design is not so clear and does not affect the present argument. The man with the sword to the right is probably Iolaos. The object surmounted by the eagles I am quite unable to explain. [Illustration: FIG. 118.] [Illustration: FIG. 119.] [Illustration: FIG. 120.]