Centaur - Toronto, Ontario
Posted by: 
Metro2
N 43° 40.070 W 079° 23.643
17T E 629472 N 4836233
Centaur, a creature of Greek mythology, were half human and half horse.
Waymark Code: WMF00D
Location: Ontario, Canada
Date Posted: 07/30/2012
Views: 3
This centaur is depicted above a model of the Acropolis in Athens located in Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum. It is porbably intended to resemble the known fragments from the Acropolis. Wikipedia's article about the Parthenon (
visit link) contains this passage:
"The metopes of the south side—with the exception of the somewhat problematic metopes 13–20, now lost—show the Thessalian Centauromachy (battle of the Lapiths aided by Theseus against the half-man, half-horse Centaurs). On the north side of the Parthenon the metopes are poorly preserved, but the subject seems to be the sack of Troy."
Wikipedia's article on Centaurs (
visit link) informs us:
"In early Attic and Boeotian vase-paintings..., they are depicted with the hindquarters of a horse attached to them; in later renderings centaurs are given the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse's withers, where the horse's neck would be.
This half-human and half-animal composition has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings, caught between the two natures, embodied in contrasted myths, both as the embodiment of untamed nature, as in their battle with the Lapiths, or conversely as teachers, like Chiron.
The centaurs were usually said to have been born of Ixion and Nephele (the cloud made in the image of Hera). Another version, however, makes them children of a certain Centaurus, who mated with the Magnesian mares. This Centaurus was either himself the son of Ixion and Nephele (inserting an additional generation) or of Apollo and Stilbe, daughter of the river god Peneus. In the later version of the story his twin brother was Lapithes, ancestor of the Lapiths, thus making the two warring peoples cousins.
Centaurs were said to have inhabited the region of Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly, the Foloi oak forest in Elis, and the Malean peninsula in southern Laconia.
Centaurs continued to figure in literary forms of Roman mythology. A pair of them draw the chariot of Constantine the Great and his family in the Great Cameo of Constantine (c314-16), which embodies wholly pagan imagery."