b. Heracles, passing through Pholoë on his way to Erymanthus where he killed one Saurus, a cruel bandit-was entertained by the Centaur Pholus, whom one of the ash-nymphs bore to Silenus. Pholus set roast meat before Heracles, but himself preferred the raw, and dared not open the Centaurs’ communal wine jar until Heracles reminded him that it was the very jar which, four generations earlier, Dionysus had left in the cave against this very occasion. The Centaurs grew angry when they smelt the strong wine. Armed with great rocks, up-rooted fir-trees, firebrands, and butchers’ axes, they made a rush at Pholus’s cave. While Pholus bid in terror, Heracles boldly repelled Ancius and Agrius, his first two assailants, with a volley of firebrands. Nephele, the Centaurs’ cloudy grandmother, then poured down a smart shower of rain, which loosened Heracles’s bow-string and made the ground slippery. However, he showed himself worthy of his former achievements, and killed several Centaurs, among them Oreus and Hylaeus. The rest fled as far as Malea, where they took refuge with Cheiron, their king, who had been driven from Mount Pelion by the Lapiths.
c. A parting arrow from Heracles’s bow passed through Elatus’s arm, and stuck quivering in Cheiron’s knee. Distressed at the accident to his old friend, Heracles drew out the arrow and though Cheiron himself supplied the ruineraries for dressing the wound, they were of no avail and he retired howling in agony to his cave; yet could not die, because he was immortal. Prometheus later offered to accept immortality in his stead, and Zeus approved this arrangement; but some say that Cheiron chose death not so much because of the pain he suffered as because he had grown weary of his long life.
d. The Centaurs now fled in various directions: some with Eurythis to Pholoë; some with Nessus to the river Evenus; some to Mount Malea; others to Sicily, where the Sirens destroyed them. Poseidon received the remainder at Eleusis, and hid them in a mountain. Among those whom Heracles later killed was Homadus the Arcadian, who tried to rape Eurystheus’s sister Alcyone; by thus nobly avenging insult offered to an enemy, Heracles won great fame.
e. Pholus, in the meantime, while burying his dead kinsmen, drew out one of Heracles’s arrows and examined it. ‘How can so robust creature have succumbed to a mere scratch?’ he wondered. But the arrow slipped from his fingers and, piercing his foot, killed him the and then. Heracles broke off the pursuit and returned to Pholoë, where he buried Pholus with unusual honours at the foot of the mountain which has taken his name. It was on this occasion that the river Anigrus acquired the foul smell which now clings to it from its very source on Mount Lapithus: because a Centaur named Pylenor, whom Heracles had winged with an arrow, fled and washed his wound there. Some, however, hold that Melampus had caused the stench some year before, by throwing into the Anigrus the foul objects used for purifying the daughters of Proetus.
f. Heracles now set off to chase the boar by the river Erymanthus. To take so savage a beast alive was a task of unusual difficulty; but he dislodged it from a thicket with loud halloos, drove it into a deep snow-drift, and sprang upon its back. He bound it with chains, and carried alive on his shoulders to Mycenae; but when he heard that the Argonauts were gathering for their voyage to Colchis, dropped the boar outside the market place and, instead of waiting for further orders from Eurystheus, who was hiding in his bronze jar, went off with Hylas to join the expedition. It is not known who despatched the captured boar, but its tusks are preserved in the temple of Apollo at Cumae.
g. According to some accounts, Cheiron was accidentally wounded by an arrow that pierced his left foot, while he and Pholus and the young Achilles were entertaining Heracles on Mount Pelion. After nine days, Zeus set Cheiron’s image among the stars as the Centaur. But others hold that the Centaur is Pholus, who was honoured by Zeus in this way because he excelled all men in the art of prophesying from entrails; The Bowman in the Zodiac is likewise a Centaur: one Crotus who lived on Mount Helicon, greatly beloved by his foster- sisters, the Muses.
2. It is probable that Heracles’s battle with the Centaurs, like the similar battle at Peirithous’s wedding, originally represented the ritual combat between a newly-installed king and opponents in beast disguise. His traditional weapons were arrows, one of which, to establish his sovereignty, he shot to each of the four quarters of the sky, and a fifth straight up into the air. Frontier wars between the Hellenes and the pre-Hellenic mountaineers of Northern Greece are also perhaps recorded this myth.
3. Poisoned arrows dropped upon, or shot into, a knee or foot, caused the death not only of Pholus and Cheiron, but also of Achilles, Cheiron’s pupil: all of them Magnesian sacred kings, whose souls the Sirens naturally received. The presence of Centaurs at Malea derives from a local tradition that Pholus’s father Silenus was born there (Pausanias); Centaurs were often represented as half goat, rather than half horse. Their presence at Eleusis, where Poseidon hid them in a mountain, suggests that when the initiate into the Mysteries celebrated a sacred marriage with the goddess, hobby-horse dancers took part in the proceedings.
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