This famous battle, later carved by Phidias on the Parthenon, was painted much earlier by Kleitias on the lower neck band of the back (side B) of the Francois Vase. It shows the legendary battle between the Lapiths and Centaurs at the marriage of Pirithous and Hippodamia. The centaurs here are three-quarters horse, one-quarter man, unlike the older, gentler centaurs who were half-man and half-beast - a whole man, in fact, on the front end, from head to foot and below the waist, like the centaur Chiron who greets Peleus at his wedding feast on the front side of this vase. Like him, these new-style, more bestial centaurs were invited guests at a wedding. But they were not used to drinking wine. At the wedding feast they got into it anyway and got drunk, until their bestiality erupted..

When the bride, Hippodameia (note the irony of her name, "Horse-Mistress"), was brought out to greet the guests, the centaur Eurytion leapt up and tried to mount her. At once all the other centaurs rose up, straddling both the women and the boys. The Lapith men, instead of hurling tables and chairs at them, buckled on their armor like good foot-soldiers (hoplites) and rushed to defend them. Theseus, a close friend of Pirithous, the groom, also joined the fray, He is out of sight here, on the left, as is Eurytion, the centaur throwing a rock at him.

That section is too badly damaged - perhaps by the museum guard who went berserk and hurled a stool at the vase, smashing it into 638 pieces - to be worth showing. But here's another image of Theseus fighting Eurytion from a later vase in the red-figure style, created by painting only the inner lines and the backgrounds of the figures black and leaving the figures clay red.



Here's our hero Theseus manhandling the centaur Eurytion. He and the Lapiths now fight stark naked, like the warriors and athletes of the day. The Lapiths, in fact, look like wrestlers depicted on scenes from the gymnasium. As for Theseus, is he here using a fist jab, a legal boxing move? Or is he poking him in the eye with a finger, an illegal move even in the no-holds-barred pankration? And is Eurytion just too sluggish to pulverize Theseus with his enormous stone?



Just left of center, three centaurs, Hylaios, Agrios and Hasbolos, use a tree limb and boulders to hammer Kaineus into the ground - the only way they could defeat him, since he was invulnerable to harm. Kaineus was originally a Lapith girl named Kainis. She was the favourite of the god Poseidon, who at her request had made her into a man and an invulnerable warror. Why? The sea god had raped her himself, then fixed her so no one could rape her again. Here the centaur Hylaios holds his tree limb overhead, while Agrios and Hasbolos hold boulders (one of which is labelled, lest you see it as a giant egg? [LITh]OS, "Rock"). Though sinking beneath their blows, Kaineus is still fully armed and carries a shield. Amazingly, even the plume on his helmet is still intact. Eventually the centaurs pounded him into the bowels of the earth. Yet he remained completely unharmed, and later he was set free as a sandy-headed bird.

For a slightly better view of him, here's a black-and-whte drawing of most of the Kaineus-pounding scene, and the two fights next to it:






At the center of the scene the centaur Petraios ("Rocky," whose Latin spelling, "Petraeus," you should recognize) wields a tree branch against a fully armed, spear-throwing Lapith named Hoplon (meaning "armored" like a Greek foot-soldier, a "hoplite"). To his right a centaur named Melanchaites ("Blackie," literally "Black-haired") holds one rock and hurls another at a Lapith, while beneath him lies a fallen centaur named Pyrrhos ("Red," literally "Flame-colored"). The centaurs' names seem to be what the Greeks called their horses, and foreigners. Out of sight still another centaur Therandros ("Beast-Man") fights a (lost) Lapith. And at their right, Dryas and the centaur Oroibios fight. So now you know why such a scene, and above all this one, is called a "Centauromachy," a "Centaur-Fight."

After several centuries, though, the fight seems to have gone out of them. Out of everyone, it seems. Here, on a vase from the British Museum, is how a Greek painter centuries later showed the start of the battle, with Eurytion trying to rape the bride (here called Laodameia instead of Hippodameia), and Perithoos, the groom, and his friend Theseus, trying to rescue her:



Pirithoos, the bridegroom, draws his sword on the left, while his bride rather feebly appeals to him to save her from a fate worse than death, or even a man-to-woman rape. The sappy expression on the centaur's face suggests he's already out of it, though, as he dreams of delights that shall never be. Note beneath him the wine bowl he's emptied and kicked over. Note also the delicate quality of the tree branch the centaur so casually carries. Lovely berries! But how could it - or he- hurt, let alone kill anyone with it? Slightly more plausible is the young Theseus on the right, about to beat him into submission with his mace or club. But even in the myth Theseus did not kill him, for we are told that eventually the Lapiths subdued Eurytion, cut off his ears and nose and threw him out of their country (Thessalonia).