Battle of the Lapiths Against the Centaurs
"Now Pirithous, bold Ixion's son, on the occasion of his marriage
to Hippodame, had invited the fierce cloud-born centaurs to take their
places at tables set out in order in a tree sheltered cave.
The princes of Thessaly were present, and I too was there at the palace which, on
that festive day, was filled with the noisy confusion of the assembled guests.
Now they were singing the marriage hymns, the great hall was
thick with smoke from the fires, when the bride appeared,
surrounded by her many attendants, young wives and matrons, surpassing them in all
her loveliness. We declared that Pirithous was a lucky man to have such a bride,
and thereby all but brought to nothing the good fortune
we predicted for him: for the sight of the bride,
no less than the wine, inflamed the passions of Eurytus, fiercest of all the fierce
centaurs.
Under the sway of drunken frenzy, intensified by lust,
he lost all control of himself. Immediately the wedding feast was thrown into
confusion, as tables were overturned, and the new bride was violently dragged off by the hair.
Eurytus siezed Hippodame, and others carried off whichever girl they fancied, or whichever one
they could. It was like the scene in a captured city-
the palace echoed with women's shrieks...
Eurytus made no reply, and wantonly attacked the girl's champion,
pummeling Theseus' face and noble breast with his fists. There
happened to be an antique goblet lying near at hand, its surface roughened by a raised design. The son of
Aegeus lifted the cup and, drawing himself up to his full height, flung it
in his enemy's face. The other fell backwards and lay, drumming his heels on the sodden ground and
vomiting from his shattered mouth gobbets of blood and wine and brains.
His brother centaurs, blazing with anger at his death, vied with one another, shouting with one accord:
"To Arms!" Wine gave them courage. As the battle began, goblets were hurled and went flying
through the air, along with fragile jugs and curved basins,
once the panoply of a feast, but now employed for war and slaughter.
'Amycus, son of Ophion, was the first who dared to rob the inner shrine of its offerings: he gave the lead by snatching from the sanctuary a branched candlestick, thickly hung with flaring lamps. Raising this aloft, as the priest raises the sacrificial axe when he strains to cleave through the snowy neck of the bull, Amycus dashed it against the forehead of the Lapith Celadon, and left him with his skull smashed, his face unrcognizable: for his eyes leaped from their sockets, his nose, pushed backwards as the bones of his face were shattered, was driven firmly into the middle of his palate. But Pelates from Pella brought Amycus to the ground with a table leg, wrenched from a maplewood table. He drove his enemy's chin down into his breast and, as Amycus was spitting our a mixture of teeth and blood, struck him a second blow that despatched him to the shades of Tartarus.
"You will suffer for this, if I can but lay hold on a weapon!" shouted Exadius. Instead of a spear, he seized a set of stag's antlers, which had been hung on a tall pine tree as a votive offering. The two branching horns pierced Gryneus' eyes, and gouged out his eyeballs, part of which clung to the horn, part trickled down on to his beard and hung there, congealed with blood.
Then Rhoteus snatched a blazing branch of plumwood from the very heart of the altar and, swinging it to the right, grazed Charaxus' temples with their coverings of yellow hair... with his half-burned branch, he renewed his assault on his foe, striking him repeatedly: three times, four times with violent blows he smashed the joinings of his skull, till the bones sank into the jellied mass of his brains.
Another figure, too, which stands before my eyes, is that of Phaecomes, who had knotted six lion skins together as a protective covering both for his human parts and for his horse's body. Hurling a huge block of wood, which two teams of oxen could scarcely have moved, he struck Tectaphos, the son of Olenus, and broke open his head from on top. The broad dome of his skull was shattered, and soft brain matter oozed out through his mouth, through the hollows of his nostrils and his eyes and ears, just as clotted milk trickles through the woven oak twigs of a basket or as the thick liquid, under the sieve's pressure, oozes through the close holes of the mesh. But, as the centaur was about to strip his fallen victim- your father knows the truth of this- I thrust my sword deep into the thigh of the despoiler.