Centaur
A creature of Greek myth with a man’s head, arms and chest on a horse’s body, best known from the centaurs’ drunken fight with the Lapiths and from Cheiron, the wise centaur who taught Achilles.
Meaning
Centaurs (SEN-tawrz, as Dictionary.com respells the word) are the wild people of the Thessalian mountains in Greek myth. In the Iliad, Nestor remembers them as “the wild tribes of the mountain caves” whom the heroes of his youth fought and destroyed, and Cheiron, who taught Achilles, is “the most righteous of the Centaurs”. The heraldry writer John Vinycomb pointed out in 1906 that Homer nowhere says they were part horse: the “half man, half horse” shape, he wrote, “arose in later times”. Ovid has it fully formed, calling them “cloud-born monsters” whose “twofold nature” unites the two strongest animals there are. In heraldry and the zodiac the centaur archer is Sagittarius.
Origin and history
The story that made them famous is the wedding of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, and Hippodame (Hippodamia). Ovid tells it in book XII of the Metamorphoses: Pirithous invited the centaurs to the feast, held in a cave shaded with trees, and Eurytus, “most savage of the savage Centaurs”, drunk on wine and on the sight of the bride, dragged her away by the hair. In the battle that followed the centaurs tore up trees to crush the invulnerable Lapith Caeneus, piling whole forests on him. Vinycomb notes that the battle of the Lapiths and the centaurs filled the metopes of the Parthenon in Athens.
Cheiron was the exception. Vinycomb sums up the later tradition: he taught Achilles music, medicine and hunting, and Zeus set him among the stars, where he is Sagittarius.
The sagittary in heraldry
Heralds call the centaur with a drawn bow a sagittary, and Vinycomb lists it among the twelve signs of the zodiac as Sagittarius (the Sagittarius glyph is an arrow). Arms with sagittaries were later credited to King Stephen of England, and writers explained them by his archers or his birth sign, but Vinycomb found “no contemporary authority” for any of those explanations. The centaur is the crest of families including Askelom, Bendlowes, Cromie, Lambert and Petty-Fitzmaurice.
Was the centaur first a horseman?
Vinycomb thought so. He suggested that the first people to ride horses, approaching and wheeling away at speed, looked to those who saw them like one creature, and compared the story told of the Indigenous peoples of South America who first saw mounted Spaniards. It is his explanation; Homer’s centaurs are simply a wild mountain people.
Read next
- Next in Mythical creatures of Greece and EuropeChimeraThe fire-breathing monster of Lycia in Greek myth, a lion in front, a goat in the middle and a serpent behind, killed by Bellerophon riding Pegasus.
- Sagittarius is the centaur archer, the sagittary of heraldry (Vinycomb)Sagittarius symbol (♐)♐ is the glyph of Sagittarius, the Archer, the ninth sign of the Western zodiac. Astrologers give its dates as 22 November to 21 December, and in their tradition it is a fire sign ruled by Jupiter.
See also
Minotaur, Hydra, Harpy, Siren, Pegasus, Griffin.
Sources
- The Iliad of Homer (tr. Lang, Leaf and Myers), Homer, The Iliad, translated by Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Myers (1883), Project Gutenberg eBook #3059, Project Gutenberg, Book I (Nestor) and Book XI (Cheiron)
- The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Books VIII–XV (tr. Henry T. Riley), Ovid, Metamorphoses, translated by Henry T. Riley (1851), Project Gutenberg eBook #26073, Project Gutenberg, Book XII, the wedding of Pirithous
- Fictitious and Symbolic Creatures in Art (John Vinycomb, 1906), John Vinycomb, Fictitious & Symbolic Creatures in Art, with Special Reference to Their Use in British Heraldry (London: Chapman and Hall, 1906), Project Gutenberg, Sagittary, Centaur, Sagittarius, Centaurus, Hippocentaur, pp. 141–146
- Centaur (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, “Centaur” (Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary), Dictionary.com, entry and pronunciation
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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