eir mother, which Jupiter
put in the place of Juno, to baulk the attempt of Ixion on her
virtue, because, according to Palaephatus, many of them lived in a
city called Nephele, which, in Greek, signifies a cloud. As another
method of accounting for their alleged descent from a cloud, it has
been suggested that the Centaurs were a rapacious race of men, who
ravaged the neighbouring country: that those who wrote the first
accounts of them, in the ancient dialect of Greece, gave them the
name of Nephelim, (the epithet of the giants of Scripture,) many
Phoenician words having been imported in the early language of that
country; and that in later times, finding them called by this name,
the Greek word Nephele, signifying 'a cloud,' persons readily
adopted the fable that they were born of one.

The Centaurs being the descendants of Centaurus, the son of Ixion,
and Pirithoues being also the son of Ixion, by Dia, the former,
declared war against Pirithoues, asserting, that, as the descendants
of Ixion, they had a right to share in the succession to his
dominions. This quarrel, however, was made up, and they continued on
friendly terms, until the attempt of Eurytus, or Eurytion, on
Hippodamia, the bride of Pirithoues, which was followed by the
consequences here described by Ovid. The Centaurs are twice
mentioned in the Iliad as +pheres+, or 'wild beasts,' and once under
the name of 'Centaurs.' Pindar is the first writer that mentions
them as being of a twofold form, partly man, and partly horse. In
the twenty-first Book of the Odyssey, line 295, Eurytion is said to
have had his ears and nose cut off by way of punishment, and that,
from that period, 'discord arose between the Centaurs and men.'

Buttman, (Mythologus, ii. p. 22, as quoted by Mr. Keightley), says
that the names of Centaurs and Lapithae are two purely poetic names,
used to designate two opposite races of men,--the former, the rude
horse-riding tribes, which tradition records to have been spread
over the north of Greece: the latter, the more civilized race, which
founded towns, and gradually drove their wild neighbours back into
the mountains. He thinks that the explanation of the word
'Centaurs,' as 'Air-piercers,' (from +kentein ten auran+) not an
improbable one, for the idea is suggested by the figure of a Cossack
leaning forward with his protruded lance as he gallops along. But he
regards