Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

Pirithous, king of the Lapiths in Thessaly (son of Ixion or of Zeus by Dia), married Hippodamia (Hippodameia). He invited both his human kin—the Lapiths—and the Centaurs of Pelion, kinsmen through Ixion’s line, to the wedding feast. Wine unbound the Centaurs’ restraint. Eurytion (or the Centaurs generally) laid hands on the bride; others seized Lapith women. The banquet became a battle inside the hall and then in the open: tables overturned, punch-bowls and brands used as weapons, Lapith heroes and Centaurs locked in slaughter. Theseus, Pirithous’s sworn friend, fought on the Lapith side. Famous named blows in the poetic tradition include Caeneus’s stand (see 036), the deaths of many Centaurs, and the routing of the rest back to the mountains. Homer’s Nestor remembers the Lapiths as the mightiest men he knew, who fought the mountain-dwelling beast-men; the *Odyssey* recalls Eurytion’s drunken outrage at Pirithous’s house as a warning against wine. Apollodorus summarizes the rape attempt and the war that followed; Ovid’s long Roman set-piece names dozens of combatants. The Centauromachy becomes the classical image of civilization against bestial hybris—and of guest-friendship shattered at a wedding—carved on the Parthenon metopes and the west pediment at Olympia as a moral and civic paradigm.