The Half-Horse Cousins

The Centaurs didn’t party very well. Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, learned this the hard way when he invited them to his wedding feast. He had to invite them: they were family; cousins, to be precise.

Wine was the everyday drink of all classes in Greece. The dinner or drinking party involved large quantities of the stuff, and weddings only more so. But custom had it that wine was always diluted with water, and it was considered a mark of the uncivilized to drink wine neat. Someone forgot to tell the half-horse cousins.

As soon as the drinks were served, the Centaurs pushed away the sour milk set before them, filled their silver horns from the wineskins, and knocked back a few rounds of undiluted wine. Then the Centaur Eurytion led the charge: he leapt from his stool, overturned the table, and dragged Hippodamia by the hair with the intent of raping her. Hippodamia happened to be the bride. The other Centaurs were not so fussy, and lecherously straddled whichever woman or boy was nearest.

The ensuing fight became known as the Centauromachy. Eurytion had his ears and nose cut off for his trouble. But each side lost favorites, and war would continue for some time after this battle was over. So everyone lost.

In the Odyssey, Antinous (who’s in the process of messing up another feast by calling the disguised Odysseus a “bleary vagabond”) puts it this way:

Here is the evil wine can do
to those who swig it down. Even the centaur
Eurytion, in Peirithous’ hall
among the Lapithai, came to a bloody end
because of wine; wine ruined him; it crazed him,
drove him wild for rape in that great house.
The princes cornered him in fury, leaping on him
to drag him out and crop his ears and nose.
Drink had destroyed his mind, and so he ended
in that mutilation – fool that he was.
Centaurs and men made war for this,
But the drunkard first brought it upon himself.

The myth has been much used by philosophers and head-doctors to reflect upon the interior struggle between cultured and ignorant behavior, moderate and unbalanced action, civilized and barbaric being. It is a (frequently repudiated) extended metaphor for the divided self. It’s certainly not a bad one, given the role of wine, for the alcoholic who has arrived at the point where he can only choose to be a sober alcoholic or a drunken one.

Hippodamia, ironically enough, means tamer of horses (hippos: horse; damazo: to tame). Whatever her skills, they were of little use with half-horses.

While we’re with the Greeks, Pythagoras is credited with the saying that drinking to achieve drunkenness is a training ground for madness. He lived between two thousand, five-hundred and eighty years ago and two thousand, five-hundred and five years ago. And I just learned the dictum a few weeks ago. I’ll speak for myself and the trouble that has mounted in all quarters of late: the drunkard first brought it upon himself.