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Lapith and a Centaur: a metope from the Parthenon

In Greek mythology, the Lapiths were a legendary people, whose home was in Thessaly on the mountain Pelion. Like the Myrmidons and other Thessalian tribes, the Lapiths were pre-Hellenic in their origins. The genealogies make them a kindred people with the Centaurs: in one version, Lapithes and Centaurus were said to be twin sons of the god Apollo and the nymph Stilbe, daughter of the river god Peneus. Lapithes was a valiant warrior, but Centaurus was a deformed being who later mated with mares, from whom the half-man, half-horse Centaurs sprang. Lapithes was the eponymous ancestor of the Lapith people,^[1] and his descendants include Lapith warriors and kings, such as Ixion, Pirithous, Caeneus, and Coronus, and the seers Idmon and Mopsus.

In the Iliad the Lapiths sent forty manned ships, commanded by Polypoetes (son of Pirithous) and Leonteus (son of Coronus, son of Caeneus). The mother of Pirithous, the Lapith king in the generation before the Trojan War, was Dia, daughter of Eioneus or Deioneus; Ixion was the father of Pirithous, but like many heroic figures,^[2] Pirithous had an immortal as well as a mortal father. Zeus was his immortal father, but the god had to assume a stallion's form to cover Dia^[3]for, like their half-horse cousins, the Lapiths were horsemen in the grasslands of Thessaly, famous for its horses. The Lapiths were credited with inventing the bridle's bit. In fact, the Lapith king Pirithous was marrying the horsewoman Hippodameia, "tamer of horses", at the wedding feast that a battle, the Centauromachy, made famous.

The best-known legend with which the Lapiths are connected is their battle with the Centaurs at the wedding feast of Pirithous, the Centauromachy. The Centaurs had been invited, but, unused to wine, their wild nature came to the fore. When the bride was presented to greet the guests, the centaur Eurytion leapt up and attempted to rape her. All the other centaurs were up in a moment, straddling women and boys. In the battle that ensued, Theseus came to the Lapiths' aid. They cut off Eurytion's ears and nose and threw him out. In the battle the Lapith Cæneus was killed, and the defeated Centaurs were expelled from Thessaly to the northwest.

Caeneus was a well-known Lapith, originally a girl named Cænis or Caenis and the favourite of Poseidon, who changed her into a man at her request and made her an invulnerable warrior. Such warrior women, indistinguishable from men, were familiar among the Scythian horsemen too (see the entry "Amazons") and survive among Albanian traditions. In the Centaur battle, Caeneus proved invulnerable, until the Centaurs simply crushed him with rocks and trunks of trees. He disappeared into the depths of the earth unharmed and was released as a sandy-headed bird.

In later contests the Centaurs were not so easily beaten. Mythic references explained the presence into historic times of primitive Lapiths in Malea and in the brigand stronghold of Pholoe in Elis as remnants of groups driven there by the Centaurs. Some historic Greek cities bore names connected with Lapiths, and the Kypselides of Corinth claimed descent from Cæneus, while the Phylaides of Attica claimed for progenitor Koronus the Lapith [1].

As Greek myth became more mediated through philosophy, the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs took on aspects of the interior struggle between civilized and wild behavior, made concrete in the Lapiths' understanding of the right usage of god-given wine, which must be tempered with water and drunk not to excess. The Greek sculptors of the school of Pheidias conceived of the battle of the Lapithae and Centaurs as a struggle between mankind and mischievous monsters, and symbolical of the great conflict between the civilized Greeks and Persian "barbarians". Battles between Lapiths and Centaurs were depicted in the sculptured friezes on the Parthenon, recalling Athenian Theseus' treaty of mutual admiration with Pirithous the Lapith, leader of the Magnetes, and on Zeus' temple at Olympia (Pausanias, v.10.2). The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was a familiar symposium theme for the vase-painters [2].

A sonnet vividly evoking the battle by the French poet José María de Heredia (1842 – 1905) was included in his volume Les Trophées [3].

Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths, by Piero di Cosimo(Note:Notice the female centaur with a male centaur in the foreground).

In the Renaissance, the battle became a favorite theme for artists : an excuse to display close-packed bodies in violent confrontation. The young Michelangelo executed a marble bas-relief of the subject in Florence about 1492 [4]. Piero di Cosimo's panel (illustration) now at the National Gallery, London, ^[4] was painted during the following decade. If it was originally part of a marriage chest, or cassone, it was perhaps an uneasy subject for a festive wedding commemoration.

• William Smith, ed. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1870) vol.11 p. 721 (on-line text)
• Ovid Metamorphoses XII passim; Odyssey XXI, 330 – 340; Iliad xii. 128, 181; Pausanias 1.7.2, 5.10.8; Strabo ix.39; Horace Carmine i. 18. 5 ; Pliny's Natural Historyiv. 8, 15, xxxvi. 5, 4.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Lapiths

• Hellenic tribes
• Carlos Parada, "Lapiths": an annotated list of Lapith names, mainly in Metamorphoses, and some Lapith descendants
• The Battle painted on Greek vases