Centaurs are rapists.
You may not have known it, but it's true: in Greek myths, the majority of centaurs were rapists. They mostly drank milk and stargazed, but when they drank wine they would fight and rape.
The most famous instance of this in Greek myth is the Centauromachy (Battle of the Centaurs). The centaurs were half-men half-horses that lived in the forest of Thessaly, and their neighbours were the law-abiding Lapiths. When Ixion - grandfather to the Centaurs and king of the Lapiths - died, his son Pirithous was to assume the throne and marry Hippodamia. The centaurs were invited to the wedding, but after getting absolutely smashed on wine that was mixed far too strong, they attempted to "carry off" (i.e. rape) the bride and many of the highborn women in attendance.
The famous Athenian hero Theseus was in attendance, essentially there as the groom's best man. When Theseus saw the centaur Eurytion dragging the bride away by her hair, he rescued her. The aggravated centaur punched Theseus in the face and, in return, the hero whacked the centaur with a bowl. The blood from Eurytion's wound mixed with the wine (weird detail to include, but Greek myths are full of such auxiliary details), and the warring began in earnest. Helped massively by Theseus, the Lapiths were able to defeat the centaurs, the survivors of whom fled to the Peloponnese.
There were some serious tragedies on the side of the Lapiths, however. Caeneus, for instance, who was born as a woman named Caenis - they were raped by Poseidon and, in return, he granted their wish to be turned into a man with impenetrable skin so that they would never have to suffer like that again. At the wedding, the centaur Latreus mocked Caeneus for being "half a man" and tried to impale him, and was killed by his own rebounding pike (well deserved, in my opinion - apparently the centaurs were transphobic, as well as rapists). Caenus was then crushed to death by the centaurs uprooting the trees of Mount Pelion and stacking them on top of him. From the pile flew a golden winged bird - that is, a bird with wings actually golden, not a seagull covered in turmeric.
I've heard of some #WeddingFails, but no wedding reception fight will ever beat this one.
On their way to the Peloponnese, the surviving centaurs ran into Heracles who mostly finished what the Lapiths had started. Only one centaur survived both attacks, named Nessus. As vengeance, he tried to rape Heracles' second wife, Deianeira.
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| Heracles & Nessus, a statue that I was lucky enough to see in Florence |
Years passed, and Deianeira gave no further thought to the mixture ... until Heracles met Iole. By "met", I mean he killed her entire family, burned her village to the ground, and then took her as a "prize", but whatever. Anyway, Deianeira took the filthy potion and smeared it on Heracles' shirt, and it turns out that you can add "liar" to Centaurs' repertoires, along with rape, murder, and transphobia, because the mixture was actually poison, which promptly killed Heracles. Well, he can't be unfaithful if he's dead, so Nessus was kind of telling the truth.
So there we have it: Centaurs are rapists.
However ...
#NotAllCentaurs
No race is naturally evil, and Chiron proves that for the centaurs.
In the Iliad, Homer describes him as 'wisest and justest of all the centaurs' (11.831). Maybe it's nurture over nature with Chiron because, unlike the other centaurs, he was fostered by Apollo and taught all of his arts: Medicine, herbs, music, archery, hunting, gymnastics, and prophesy. It was supposedly this relationship with the Olympian that allowed him to transcend his birthright of savagery and alcoholism.
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| Chiron & Achilles, Fresco from Herculaneum (I didn't get to visit because I went to Pompeii instead) |
If you have ever asked yourself "What makes a hero?", Chiron would be the one to answer. He was given one of the most important jobs in Greek myth: training the heroes. His students included: Odysseus, Heracles, Aeneas, Ajax, Diomedes, Jason, the Dioscuri, Theseus, as well as my personal favourites Achilles and Patroclus.
He is also sometimes credited with tutoring Dionysus, that revelrous latecomer to the Olympic Pantheon who I keep promising to do a full post on but haven't quite gotten around to it yet. According to some sources, Chiron taught Dionysus all about chanting and dancing, which were later the cornerstones of his Bacchic rites.
This is why all of the heroes were so similarly skilled in fighting, as well as supposedly knowing the meaning of justice and valour, and how to dress wounds and play instruments.
Chiron lived on Mount Pelion and would teach his students everything he knew, before they went off to make an everlasting name for themselves.
That's how I am currently trying to channel Chiron.
Blogging imitates life
The point of this blog was to reflect my research throughout my PhD. Well, these past two months, I haven't done all that much research, because I've been focussing on teaching. Last term, I taught a Comparative Literature module called Heroic Men, and this term I'm teaching on two other modules: Heroic Men's follow-up module Heroic Women, and the English Literature Module Novel & Narratology.
I really didn't think I would enjoy teaching. People who know me are quite shocked by this confession, because I am extroverted (by which I mean that I am outrageously loud) and love talking about books. But I was worried I wouldn't be patient enough, kind enough, resilient enough, well-informed enough, or just good enough to make it as a teacher.
But, to my own surprise (though, perhaps to nobody else's), I really took to it. I love teaching now! I love re-reading some of my favourite novels, I love reading classic novels I know I should've already read, I love reading novels I'd never heard of. I love planning lessons around those novels. More than anything else, I love going into a classroom full of clever and engaged students, and talking to them about literature, theory, and the world at large.
I feel immensely privileged to be allowed to teach - I am thoroughly enriched by these classes, and I hope my students are too.
But, there's always a but.
The "But" here is that universities across the U.K. take us massively for granted. They don't care that we go to University for a love of learning and, by the time we reach our doctoral degrees, this love of learning gets to become a love of teaching, which can be translated into a love of learning and teaching for the next generation of students.
They just care about the money.
They give us casual contracts and massively underpay us for lesson preparations and, in doing this, they are telling us what we already know: that they don't value our contribution to academia.
They know that we need the teaching experience if we want to go into academia, so we will take these exploitative deals, regardless of the fact that without Graduate Teaching Assistants such as myself, they literally do not have enough staff to do all of the teaching.
They do, however, care that Undergraduate students are the biggest source of income. So the only way to make them listen to the fact that we want #FairPayForGTAs is to strike. This massively impacts students' learning and, honestly, none of us want to do that but it is the only way to make universities listen. Also, the more students that are impacted, the more politically motivated the Undergraduate student body becomes, the more likely universities are to listen.
None of us go into academia to make loads of money, but we would quite like the financial security of pensions and proper contracts and pay that matches the amount of work that we actually do. For instance, it takes more than half an hour to read Great Expectations and plan a lesson on it - see my friend Josh's Exploitation Framework for the harsh realities of our present teaching situation.
Remember kids: Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong.
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| Via Instagram |
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