Moreover I am inclined to think that such a development was likely to occur in the representations of art even more readily than in verbal descriptions. For even if the artist belonged to an age which had not yet forgotten that the Centaurs were human beings capable of turning themselves by sorcery into beasts, how was he to distinguish the Centaur in his picture either from an ordinary man, if the Centaur were in his ordinary human shape, or from a real animal, if the Centaur were in his assumed shape? He might of course have drawn an ordinary man and have inscribed the legend, ‘This is a Centaur capable of assuming other forms’; or he might have drawn an ordinary animal with the explanatory note, ‘This is not really an animal but a Centaur in disguise.’ But if such expedients did not satisfy his artistic instincts, what was he to do? Surely his only course was to depict the Centaur in his normal human shape, and by some animal adjunct to indicate his powers of transformation. And that is what he did; for in the earliest art the fore part of the Centaur is a complete human figure, and the hind part is a somewhat disconnected equine appendage[656].
Nor is this artistic convention without parallel in ancient Greece. At Phigalea there was once, we are told, an ancient statue of Demeter represented as a woman with the head and mane of a horse; and the explanation of this equine adjunct was that she had once assumed the form of a mare[657]. In other words, the power of transformation was indicated in art by a composite form.
Hence indeed it is not unlikely that the very method which early artists adopted of indicating the Centaurs’ power to assume various single forms, being misunderstood by later generations among whom the Centaurs’ human origin and faculty of magical transformation were no longer predominant traditions, contributed not a little to the conception of Centaurs in an invariable composite form; and that later art, by blending the two incongruous elements into a more harmonious but less significant whole, confirmed men in that misunderstanding, until the old traditions became a piece of rare and local lore.
Thus on three separate grounds--the analogy of world-wide superstition which attributes to sorcerers the power of assuming bestial form; the tendency detected in modern Greek folk-lore to replace beings of single shape, but capable of transforming themselves into other single shapes, by creatures of composite shape; and the contrast between the horse-centaurs of archaic art and those of the Parthenon--we are led to the same conclusion, namely that the Centaurs were a tribe of reputed sorcerers whose most striking manifestation of power, in the eyes of their Achaean neighbours, was to turn themselves into wild beasts. The name Pheres was then in truth a title of respect, a title in no way derogatory to the virtuous Chiron, who, if he exercised his magical powers chiefly in mercy and healing, shared doubtless with the other Centaurs the miraculous faculty of metamorphosis.