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The life appears hardy and dangerous to these; they would make prodigies of themselves; bound to debauchery as Mazeppa to his horse, they gallop, making Centaurs of themselves and seeing neither the bloody trail that the shreds of their flesh leave, nor the eyes of the wolves that gleam in hungry pursuit, nor the desert, nor the vultures.
These of a truth were in might the supreme of the children of mankind; Mightiest they upon earth and with mightiest foes they contended, Centaurs nurs'd in the hills, whom in terrible ruin they trampled. These, the allies of my youth, when I first adventur'd from Pylos, Far from the Apian land, being call'd of themselves for a comrade.
For a type of this Olympian spirit we may take a phenomenon that has perhaps sometimes wearied us: the reiterated insistence in the reliefs of the best period on the strife of men against centaurs or of gods against giants. Our modern sympathies are apt to side with the giants and centaurs. An age of order likes romantic violence, as landsmen safe in their houses like storms at sea.
In these halcyon days at this hospitable table Michael Angelo met such men as Massilio Ficino, the interpreter of Plato; Pico della Mirandola, the phoenix of erudition; Luigi Pulci and Angelo Poliziano—the latter is supposed to have incited Michael Angelo to carve the bas-relief now in the Casa Buonarroti, called by Condivi "The rape of Deianeira and the battle of the Centaurs."
Judged by the canons either of common sense, or of science, which are indeed one and the same, all "miracles" are centaurs, or they would not be miracles; and men of sense and science will deal with them on the same principles.
Fairies and Elves, Satyrs and Forsters, Centaurs and Lapithae, played their parts in these gaudy spectacles with every conventional requirement of shape, costume, and behavior point-de-vice, and were supplied by the poet, to whom the letter-press of the show had been confided, with language and a plot, both pregnant with more than Platonic morality.
The satyrs, centaurs, and other animal forms are all part of these same representations and are similarly explained. Our main object in giving the above account of these various symbols has been to illustrate the wide prevalence of sex worship among primitive races.
But scarcely had he done so when the Centaurs caught the perfume of the rare old wine, and, armed with stones and pine clubs, surrounded the cave of Pholus. The first who tried to force their way in Hercules drove back with brands he seized from the fire. The rest he pursued with bow and arrow, driving them back to Malea, where lived the good Centaur, Chiron, Hercules' old friend.
They seemed like centaurs, and the rapidity with which they broke up their squadron, in order immediately after to close up again at another place in dense masses, rendered a counter attack on the part of the serried ranks of their adversaries almost impossible. At one time, Heideck, with that part of the staff to which he had attached himself, had been drawn into the shock of battle.
The inscription also bade the stranger look out at a certain part of the heavens, at a certain hour of the clear night, and he would behold the dead alive among the stars, whither Jupiter had transferred the good genius. The wisest of the centaurs continued, nevertheless, in the service of mankind. In his hand he held a scroll, on which, graven in Greek, were paragraphs of a notice: "O Traveller!
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