Tagus The Night Horse

In Greek mythology, the centaurs (from - Kéntauroi) are a race of creatures composed of part human and part horse. In early Attic and Boeotian vase-paintings, as on the kantharos illustrated below left, they are depicted with the hindquarters of a horse attached to them; in later renderings centaurs are given the torso of a human joined at the waist to the horse's withers, where the horse's neck would be.

This half-human and half-animal composition has led many writers to treat them as liminal beings, caught between the two natures, embodied in contrasted myths, both as the embodiment of untamed nature, as in their battle with the Lapiths, or conversely as teachers, like Chiron.

Category: File - :Cantharus Stathatou Louvre CA1987.jpg|thumb|left|upright|Centaurs on a kantharos, Boeotia, Late Geometric Period (Louvre Museum)

The centaurs were usually said to have been born of Ixion and Nephele (the cloud made in the image of Hera). Another version, however, makes them children of a certain Centaurus, who mated with the Magnesian mares. This Centaurus was either himself the son of Ixion and Nephele (inserting an additional generation) or of Apollo and Stilbe, daughter of the river god Peneus. In the latter version of the story his twin brother was Lapithus, ancestor of the Lapiths, thus making the two warring peoples cousins.

Centaurs were said to have inhabited the region of Magnesia and Mount Pelion in Thessaly, Mount Pholoe in Arcadia and the Malean peninsula in southern Laconia.

Centaurs continued to figure in literary forms of Roman mythology.

:This article discusses significance-laden journeys. For other meanings see Quest (disambiguation)

In mythology and literature a quest ? a journey towards a goal ? serves as a plot device and (frequently) as a symbol. Quests appear in the folklore of every nationJosepha Sherman, Once upon a Galaxy p 142 ISBN 0-87483-387-6 and also figure prominently in non-national cultures. In literature, the objects of quests require great exertion on the part of the hero, and the overcoming of many obstacles, typically including much travel especially over a body of water.

Travel also allows the storyteller to showcase exotic locations and cultures (an objective of the narrator, not of the character).Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, p 178-9, ISBN 0-7006-0832-X