Cyprian Centaurs (Kentauroi Kyprioi)

Region/Culture: Southern Europe (island of Cyprus, Greek tradition)
Mythos: Cyprian Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Bull-horned centaurs and fertility daimones
Mythical Attributes: A tribe of half-horse, ox-horned spirits embodying the fertile, generative power of the Cyprian earth.
Role in Mythos: Rustic fertility daimones who attended the goddess Aphrodite and marched among the wild divinities in Dionysus’s army against the Indians.
Relation to Humans: They are bound to the cultivated land of Cyprus and the worship of Aphrodite rather than to dealings with individual mortals. Gentler than the violent Thessalian centaurs, they appear as a benevolent collective of nature spirits rather than predators of travellers.

On the warm soil of Cyprus, in the season when the fields smell of crushed thyme and sea salt, a strange crop once came up that no farmer had sown. Where the seed had fallen the ground swelled and split, and out of the furrow climbed creatures with the chests and arms of men, the bodies of horses, and the curved horns of cattle rising from their brows. They shook the loose dirt from their flanks and stood blinking in the hard Mediterranean light, fully grown and already wild. No mother had carried them. The earth had done the carrying.

Their making was an accident, and not a flattering one. Zeus had fixed his desire on Aphrodite, the Paphian goddess whose oldest sanctuaries stood on Cyprus, and Aphrodite wanted nothing to do with a suitor who happened to be her own father. She ran. She was faster than he was, and the chase came to nothing. In his frustration the god let his seed fall on the plowland, the hot foam of a love he could not finish, and the soil of Cyprus took what the goddess had refused. Gaia, the Earth, received that fruitful dew and pushed up a horned generation, two-coloured and strange to look at, half-horse and crowned like bulls.

They were called the Kentauroi Kyprioi, the Cyprian Centaurs, and also the Pheres Kyprioi, the Beasts of Cyprus. The name centaur invites a comparison with the famous tribe of Thessaly, the drunken brawlers who wrecked a wedding feast and fought the Lapiths. The resemblance is only skin deep. The Cyprian breed shared the half-man, half-horse build, but they carried the horns of oxen on their heads, and the old accounts take care to insist they were not the same stock and shared no line of descent. Where the Thessalian centaurs stood for violence and appetite, the Cyprian ones belonged to the gentler work of the island, to fertility and growth and the generative power that Aphrodite governed. They were her attendants, rustic spirits moving in her train.

In the season of increase they drifted through the cultivated land below the goddess’s shrine, horned heads bowed among the young green, a herd that was also a kind of congregation. Theirs was the slow work of fertile things. They did not hunt travellers or carry off brides.

Cyprus already kept a horned people of its own, and the two traditions sit close together. The Cerastae of Amathus were men with double horns on their foreheads who fell into the habit of cutting the throats of their guests at an altar to Zeus the god of hospitality. Aphrodite, sickened by the blood spilled on her own island, turned them into bullocks and let them keep the horns they had earned. The horned creatures who served the goddess and the horned men she punished are not one story, but they share a landscape and a set of horns, and together they suggest an island content to imagine its holy ground crowded with things that were partly animal.

The Cyprian Centaurs have a single real moment of action, and it arrives when Dionysus goes to war. To carry his long campaign against the Indians the god raised an army out of the wild corners of the world, and Rhea, mother of the gods, called up the rustic divinities to swell its ranks. Among the satyrs and the other twiform tribes came the Cyprian Centaurs, leaving the island behind and falling in with the great unruly column as it ground eastward in a haze of dust and bellowing. For once they were not a quiet herd in a field but soldiers in a god’s mad parade.

Beyond that they keep to the background. Not one of them is given a name. None has a death, a love affair, a famous trick played on a hero. They move as a crowd, a horned and many-legged generation, and the handful of lines that mention them describe a type rather than any single creature. That is nearly all there is.

What can be said of their bodies is what can be said of any centaur, with one alteration. The frame of a man rose where a horse’s neck should be, joined at the waist to the barrel and four legs of a horse, but the brow was set with the horns of cattle rather than left bare. One old phrase calls the whole brood two-coloured, as though the man’s skin and the horse’s hide met along a visible seam, two textures and two temperatures in one animal. They would have smelled of warm hide and turned earth.

Their gifts were the gifts of the ground that made them. As fertility daimones they carried the generative force of the Cyprian soil, embodiments of increase fit to serve the goddess of love, and that origin softened them. The savagery that ran in the Thessalian centaurs was bred out of these. Born from the meeting of the sky-god’s seed and the body of the Earth, they belonged fully to neither parent, rooted in the land yet shaped like the roaming beasts of the hills.

Their limits are the limits of a footnote. They survive almost entirely in the verses of one late poet, Nonnus, who set them down in his enormous Dionysiaca centuries after the classical age had closed. They hold no temple, no cult title, no story that hinges on a choice they made. The accident that produced them remains the most interesting fact about them, and they never get out from under it. When the army of Dionysus moved on and the poem reached its end, the Cyprian Centaurs sank back into the ground they had come from, and the record closed over them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Cyprian Centaurs?

The Cyprian Centaurs were a tribe of bull-horned centaurs native to the island of Cyprus in Greek mythology. Unlike ordinary centaurs they had the curved horns of oxen, and they served as fertility spirits, or daimones, in the train of the goddess Aphrodite. They are also known by the name Pheres Kyprioi, the Beasts of Cyprus.

How were the Cyprian Centaurs born?

The Cyprian Centaurs were born from an accident. When Zeus pursued the goddess Aphrodite and she fled from him, he spilled his seed onto the plowland of Cyprus. Gaia, the Earth, received it and brought forth a strange horned generation of half-horse creatures, so the Cyprian Centaurs had the Earth for a mother and the frustrated desire of Zeus for an origin.

How are the Cyprian Centaurs different from regular centaurs?

The Cyprian Centaurs carried the horns of oxen, which the famous Thessalian centaurs did not, and ancient sources stress that the two groups were not related and shared no line of descent. The Cyprian kind were also gentler. They were fertility daimones tied to growth and the worship of Aphrodite, rather than the violent, wine-maddened brawlers of Thessaly.

What do the Cyprian Centaurs do in mythology?

The Cyprian Centaurs are best known for joining the army of Dionysus. When the god marched east to wage war on the Indians, Rhea summoned the rustic divinities to fill his ranks, and the Cyprian Centaurs marched among the satyrs and other wild beings. Outside of that campaign they appear chiefly as attendant spirits of Aphrodite on their home island.

Where does the story of the Cyprian Centaurs come from?

The Cyprian Centaurs are attested almost entirely in the Dionysiaca, a vast Greek epic written by the poet Nonnus in the fifth century AD. They are closely connected to the Cerastae, a horned people of the Cyprian city of Amathus, which reflects a wider Cyprian tradition of imagining horned, partly animal beings tied to the island’s worship of Aphrodite.