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Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter III: Monsters & Creatures

Centaurs, Satyrs and Nymphs: Wild Beings of Greek Myth

Centaurs, satyrs and nymphs in Greek myth: the Lapith battle, Chiron and Nessus, Silenus, satyr plays, Pan and Marsyas, and the nymphs of springs and caves.

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Centaurs, satyrs and nymphs are the half-wild beings of Greek myth who lived in the mountains, forests, springs and seas beyond the city. Centaurs were part man and part horse, usually violent and drunken, with the wise Chiron as a famous exception; satyrs were horse-tailed, pleasure-loving companions of Dionysus; and nymphs were long-lived female spirits of springs, trees, mountains and the sea who received real cult in caves across the Greek world. Together they embodied nature's beauty and danger and the thin line between the human and the animal.

Centaurs and the Battle with the Lapiths§

According to Pindar's second Pythian Ode (fifth century BCE), the Thessalian king Ixion tried to seduce Hera; Zeus deceived him with a cloud shaped like the goddess, and the cloud bore a son, Kentauros, who mated with the mares of Mount Pelion and fathered the centaurs, human above and horse below. They lived in the forests of Thessaly, fought with rocks and pine trunks and could not hold their wine.

Their most famous story is the battle with the Lapiths, a Thessalian people. Homer already knows it: in the Iliad old Nestor recalls fighting the "mountain-dwelling beasts" beside the Lapith heroes, and in the Odyssey the centaur Eurytion gets drunk in the hall of the Lapith king Pirithous and is mutilated for his violence. Later sources set the fight at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia, where the drunken centaurs tried to carry off the bride and the women guests. Ovid's Metamorphoses book 12 gives a long, gory account.

The centauromachy filled Greek temple sculpture: the west pediment of the temple of Zeus at Olympia (c. 460 BCE), with Apollo standing calm at the centre of the struggle, the south metopes of the Parthenon in Athens and the frieze of the temple of Apollo at Bassae. Scholars often read these scenes as civilisation against savagery, or Greeks against barbarians after the Persian Wars. The oldest known centaur is a painted terracotta from Lefkandi on Euboea (c. 900 BCE), and early artists gave centaurs human forelegs.

Chiron, Pholus and Nessus: Three Famous Centaurs§

Chiron stood apart from his kin. He was the son of the Titan Kronos and the Oceanid Philyra, and so immortal; he lived in a cave on Pelion and was famed for justice, music, hunting and medicine. The Iliad calls him the most righteous of the centaurs and says he taught Achilles the use of healing herbs. Pindar makes him the teacher of Asclepius and Jason as well, and other sources add Actaeon and Aristaeus. A Roman painting from Herculaneum shows him teaching Achilles the lyre.

His death was tied to the labours told in Heracles and the twelve labours. In Apollodorus' version, Heracles was entertained by the kindly centaur Pholus, who opened a jar of wine belonging to all the centaurs; the others, maddened by the smell, attacked, and Heracles drove them off with arrows dipped in the Hydra's poison. One arrow struck Chiron in the knee and caused an incurable wound. Unable to die and unwilling to suffer, Chiron gave up his immortality, in some accounts to Prometheus, and was set among the stars, usually as the constellation Centaurus, though some ancient writers identified him with Sagittarius, the archer of the western zodiac.

Nessus, another centaur, ferried travellers across the river Evenus and tried to assault Heracles' wife Deianeira. Heracles shot him, and the dying Nessus gave Deianeira his poisoned blood as a supposed love charm. Years later she smeared it on a robe for her husband, and its burning killed him, a story dramatised in Sophocles' Women of Trachis.

Satyrs and Silenoi: Companions of Dionysus§

Satyrs were male spirits of the wild with the ears and tail of a horse, snub noses and an unbounded appetite for wine, music, dancing and nymphs. A fragment of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women already speaks of the "worthless, idle race of satyrs", born alongside the mountain nymphs. Closely related were the silenoi, a name used in Ionian art for much the same creatures; in Athens the two terms merged, and Silenus became the name of the satyrs' elderly, pot-bellied father and the tutor of Dionysus. Together they form the god's rowdy entourage, the thiasos, in countless vase paintings and in the stories discussed in Dionysus and the Bacchae.

Silenus was also credited with dark wisdom. King Midas was said to have caught him by mixing wine into a spring, and when forced to speak he declared that the best thing for humans is never to be born, and the next best to die as soon as possible; the story is preserved from a lost dialogue of Aristotle. In Hellenistic and Roman art satyrs gradually acquired goat features from Pan and merged with the Roman fauns. Their horns, hoofs and shaggy legs later contributed to the Christian image of the Devil traced in the history of Satan and the Devil.

Satyr Plays, Marsyas and the God Pan§

At the Athenian festival of the City Dionysia each tragic poet presented three tragedies followed by a satyr play, in which a chorus of satyrs led by Silenus blundered into a heroic myth. Euripides' Cyclops is the only complete satyr play to survive; about half of Sophocles' Trackers (Ichneutae), in which the satyrs hunt for the cattle stolen by the infant Hermes, was recovered from a papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt and published in 1912. The Pronomos Vase in Naples (c. 400 BCE) shows the cast of a satyr play holding their masks.

One satyr met a grim fate. Athena invented the double pipes (aulos) but threw them away because playing them distorted her face; the satyr Marsyas picked them up and challenged Apollo to a musical contest. The god won and flayed his rival alive, and Herodotus says Marsyas' skin was shown hanging at Celaenae in Phrygia. The myth inspired a sculptural group by Myron and, much later, Titian's Flaying of Marsyas.

Pan, though a god, belongs with these beings. Born in Arcadia, goat-legged and horned, he was a son of Hermes; the Homeric Hymn to Pan says his nurse fled at the sight of the bearded baby. Herodotus records that he appeared to the runner Pheidippides before the battle of Marathon (490 BCE), after which the Athenians gave him a cave shrine below the Acropolis. The sudden, groundless terror he caused gave English the word "panic". Plutarch tells the strange story of a sailor called Thamus who, in the reign of Tiberius, heard a voice announcing that "Great Pan is dead".

Nymphs: Spirits of Springs, Trees, Mountains and Sea§

The Greek word nymphē means a young woman or bride, and the nymphs were imagined as beautiful young goddesses who lived for an immensely long time but were not always immortal. A Hesiodic riddle measures their life as ten times that of the phoenix, which itself outlives many generations of crows, stags and ravens. They were classed by their dwelling:

  • Naiads, nymphs of springs, rivers and lakes, among them Eurydice in some versions of Orpheus and Eurydice.
  • Oreads, nymphs of mountains, such as Echo, who in Ovid's story fades away for love of Narcissus until only her voice remains.
  • Dryads and hamadryads, nymphs of trees; the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite describes nymphs born with pines and oaks whose lives end when their trees die.
  • Nereids, the fifty daughters of the sea god Nereus, including Thetis, mother of Achilles, and Amphitrite, wife of Poseidon; their sea-world is explored in Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis.
  • Oceanids, the three thousand daughters of Ocean, and the Meliae, ash-tree nymphs born from the blood of Ouranos.

Nymphs were nurses of gods and heroes, lovers of mortals and sometimes their captors. The best-known abduction is that of Hylas, the young companion of Heracles, whom the nymphs of a spring pulled down into the water as he drew it, told by Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus and painted by J. W. Waterhouse in 1896.

Nymph Caves, Cult and Nympholepsy§

Unlike most beings of myth, nymphs received widespread, practical worship. Their sanctuaries were springs and above all caves. Homer describes a cave of the nymphs on Ithaca with stone bowls and looms, which the Neoplatonist Porphyry later interpreted as an allegory of the cosmos. Excavations have found such cult caves across Greece. In the Corycian cave above Delphi, sacred to Pan and the nymphs, archaeologists recovered thousands of knucklebones (astragaloi) that were probably used for games or for casting lots, a practice placed in context in What Is Divination?. In the cave at Vari on Mount Hymettus in Attica, a fifth-century man named Archedamus of Thera carved inscriptions saying that he had tended the cave and its garden and calling himself nympholēptos, "seized by the nymphs".

Nympholepsy, possession by nymphs, could bring poetic or prophetic gifts but also madness; in Plato's Phaedrus Socrates, sitting by a stream sacred to the nymphs, jokes that he is speaking like one possessed. The belief outlived antiquity. In modern Greek folklore the neraides, a name descended from the ancient Nereids, are beautiful and dangerous spirits of springs and lonely places, as the folklorist J. C. Lawson recorded in 1910, and their stories resemble the fairy lore of western Europe discussed in changelings and fairy abduction.

Frequently asked questions§

Where did centaurs come from in Greek myth?§

Pindar says they descended from Kentauros, son of Ixion and a cloud that Zeus shaped to look like Hera, and the mares of Mount Pelion in Thessaly. Chiron had a different origin, as the son of Kronos and the nymph Philyra.

What is the difference between a satyr and a faun?§

Satyrs are Greek companions of Dionysus, originally with horse ears and tails. Fauns are Roman woodland spirits named after the god Faunus, and in Roman art they merged with satyrs, often acquiring goat legs from the Greek god Pan.

Were nymphs immortal?§

Not always. Many were daughters of gods and lived for an immense span, but some sources make them mortal, and tree nymphs were believed to die with their trees.

Sources and further reading§