Isaac Asimov's Worlds of Fantasy. Book 6: Mythical Beasties

Centaur

The horse was tamed about 2000 B.C. by the nomads of the Central Asian steppes, and when it drew a light chariot bearing a driver and an armed warrior, it proved a fearsome weapon. The horsemen conquered the entire civilized world from India to Egypt, and held their rule until the dominated people learned the use of the horse themselves.

By 800 B.C.. the Medes of western Asia had bred horses large enough to carry men on their backs, and that combination was even more fearsome. To farmers who encountered horsemen for the first time this combination of men and animals must have seemed monstrous.

The early Greeks were not horsepeople, for their mountainous terrain and narrow valleys were not conducive to either the breeding or the use of horses. In northern Greece, however, there was the plain of Thessaly, and there horses and horsemen made their appearance.

The fearful Greeks must have first seen them as horsehuman combinations, and so was born the myth of the ' 'centaur,'' finally portrayed in Greek art as a creature with the head and torso of a human being replacing the head and neck of a horse. For the most part, the Greeks pictured the centaurs as barbarians-crude, wild. lawless, easily made drunk, and, in that state, prone to be lascivious. Perhaps' that is how they saw the real Thessalian horsemen.

At least one centaur, however, named Chiron, was wise, Edward D. Hoch noble, and learned. He was the tutor of Hercules and Achilles, among others.

The centaur of the story that follows falls between these two extremes.