Such was the origin of every form, whether living today or extinct: dragons and chameleons, chimeras and harpies, crocodiles and minotaurs, elephants and giants, whose petrified bones are still found today, to our amazement, in the heart of the mountains. And so it was for the centaurs themselves, since in this festival of origins, in this panspermia, the few survivors of the human family had also taken part.

Notably, Cam, the profligate son, took part: the first generation of centaurs originated in his wild passion for a Thessalian horse. From the beginning, their progeny were noble and strong, preserving the best of both human nature and equine. They were at once wise and courageous, generous and shrewd, good at hunting and at singing, at waging war and at observing the heavens. It seemed, in fact, as happens with the most felicitous unions, that the virtues of the parents were magnified in their progeny, since, at least in the beginning, they were more powerful and faster racers than their Thessalian mothers, and a good deal wiser and more cunning than black Cam and their other human fathers. This would also explain, according to some, their longevity; though others have instead attributed this to their eating habits, which I will come to in a moment. Or it could simply be a projection across time of their great vitality, and this I, too, believe resolutely (and the story I am about to tell attests to it): that in hereditary terms the herbivore power of the horse does not count as much as the red blindness of the bloody and forbidden spasm, the moment of human-feral fullness in which they were conceived.

Whatever we may think of this, anyone who has carefully considered the centaurs’ classical traditions cannot help noticing that centauresses are never mentioned. As I learned from Trachi, they do not in fact exist.

The man–mare union, today, moreover, fertile only in rare cases, produces and only ever has produced male centaurs, for which there must be a fundamental reason, though at present it eludes us. As for the inverse of the unions, between stallions and women, these occur very rarely at any point in time, and furthermore come about through the solicitation of dissolute women, who by nature are not particularly inclined to procreate.

In the exceptional cases in which fertilization is successful in these very rare unions, a female bi-part offspring is produced: her two natures, however, inversely assembled. The creatures have the head, neck and front feet of a horse, but their back and stomach are those of a human female, and the hind legs are human.

During his long life Trachi encountered very few of them, and he assured me that he felt no attraction to these squalid monsters. They are not ‘proud and nimble’, but insufficiently vital; they are infertile, idle and transient; they do not become familiar with man or learn to obey his commands, but live miserably in the densest forests, not in herds but in rural solitude. They feed on grass and berries, and when they are surprised by a man they have the curious habit of always presenting themselves to him head first, as if embarrassed by their human half.