And last but not least, thank you so much to all of you who read and reviewed and spread the word about Helen of Sparta, because without Helen’s success, I would never have been brave enough to publish Tamer of Horses. I hope you’ll find it a worthy installment of Greek Bronze Age heroics, despite the presence of so many centaurs. Hippodamia’s story is one that is very close to my heart, and I hope you’ll love her as much as you did Helen.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Pirithous’s legend is incredibly fragmented, but his marriage to Hippodamia and the war with the centaurs that followed is one of the few larger pieces of his mythology that’s survived. Ovid, Psuedo-Apollodorus, Diodorus, Plutarch, even Homer, among a great many others—there are so many accounts of the Centauromachy in ancient literature, as well as artwork appearing on vases, in friezes, and sculpted in marble and bronze from antiquity into the modern day. Hippodamia and Pirithous themselves, however, are more obscure. Of Pirithous, we have only the moments when his path crosses with Theseus in the myths, and of Hippodamia there is even less from which to draw her character. But one piece, one small line that’s stuck with me, is her suggested kinship to the centaurs. I couldn’t help but wonder what that might mean. If Hippodamia was, in some way, kin to the centaurs, what would that look like? How was it possible?
For the most part, Tamer of Horses is the end result of that thought experiment. Hippodamia as a foundling daughter of the centaur king would have made a perfect match for Pirithous, a convenient means to shore up the difficult relationship they must have had with the Lapith people, as the unnatural children and grandchildren of the former king, Ixion. Could she have been something else altogether? Absolutely. Sometimes she’s a daughter of Atrax, himself a son of a river god. Or maybe a daughter of a man named Butes. Some accounts even give her a different name, Deidamia or Laodamia, or Hippoboteia, or even Dia or Ischomache. Such is the nature of Greek Myth, that it gives us so many variations—particularly when it comes to non-heroic women. But as a foundling with no notion of her true parentage, my Hippodamia could still be any of these things.
But also as a foundling, raised by centaurs instead of inside the incredible palace society of Mycenaean Greece, she gets to be a different kind of woman, with different expectations of what her life and her marriage should be. She is not bound by the same societal restrictions, and with the examples of Pirithous’s mother, Dia, and Theseus’s Amazon wife, Antiope, she’s able to find even greater strength and agency. And to be frank, I couldn’t imagine Pirithous taking just any woman as his wife. She had to have been exceptional and unique. Exceptional enough that decades later, he would accept nothing less than a daughter of Zeus for his second wife—a decision which would lead him into much the same ruin as Ixion, costing him his kingdom and his life when he is trapped in Hades for his hubris in thinking to steal Persephone herself as his bride.
As in Helen of Sparta and By Helen’s Hand, to which this book can be considered a prequel and is certainly meant to be read as part of the same larger world and timeline, my imagining of Mycenaean Greece is influenced hugely both by the work of Dr. Dmitri Nakassis, who suggests a flourishing middle class outside the palaces, and M.I. Finley’s World of Odysseus, which proposes that the kings of this period could not rule without the consent of their people. Interestingly, Thessaly, unlike the more southern regions of the Peloponnese and Attica, escaped much of the destruction we associate with the collapse of Mycenaean society. And we see this most clearly, perhaps, in their burial sites, where we can watch the slow progression from Tholos tombs and simple graves in the Bronze Age to cremation and funeral pyres, which don’t appear at all in Thessaly until the early Iron Age—though they were certainly in evidence among the Hittites, their neighbors across the sea.
But because Homer is by far the greatest influence on our cultural consciousness regarding the disposal of the dead during this period, and Homer chooses to depict the fallen warriors and heroes of Greece set ablaze upon a pyre, I felt a small compromise might be in order. Both the Homeric pyres and the Mycenaean archaeological evidence point to the same basic rituals and superstitions, the same concern for the body and spirit pre-decomposition, and in contrast to such extreme consideration, a certain amount of carelessness for the remaining bones, after. This suggests that the spirit was no longer connected to the remains, but was considered to have completed its journey to the afterlife. Hippodamia and Pirithous both make mention of the use of tombs and graves, and note that the pyres they’ve chosen for the disposal of their dead are an exception, not the rule, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility, either, that faced with a large number of dead, and their potentially malicious spirits, a pyre might have been considered to speed up the natural processes of decomposition. And for the Lapiths, with the centaurs still a threat, time was certainly short.
As to the burial rituals and practices of the centaurs themselves, it made sense to me that they would follow similar traditions, utilizing natural caves instead of building complex tombs. Centaurus is, after all, more man than beast, and unquestionably a son of Ixion. His natural offspring, however, are something else altogether. And in this element of their culture, also, I followed mythic tradition—for as Nestor so frequently reminds us in the Iliad, it was natural to the Greeks for each successive generation to be considered less worthy than the one that came before. That this degeneration might have been hurried by Centaurus’s mating with the Mares of Magnesia seemed a reasonable progression within the confines of that established mythic tradition. But it doesn’t make Hippodamia’s ultimate decision any more horrific, nor excuse what feels to my modern sensibilities like a genocidal solution, which ultimately all but wiped out an entire tribe, if not an entire species.
I’ve chosen to keep the fantastic element of the centaurs intact, to allow Pirithous to be an exceptional man with exceptional and god-given power, just as Heracles might have been. While these elements are not strictly historical, I do feel it’s important to allow myth to still be myth and leave room for these elements of the supernatural. Because even today, in the modern world, with all our advantages, we are still so limited in our understanding of history, and I’m inclined to give the Ancient Greeks the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their own beliefs. Perhaps the centaurs were only a warring tribe of men with a gift for horsemanship that rivaled the Lapiths—who, for all their skill, did not yet realize that horses could be ridden into battle as cavalry, though I have allowed Hippodamia to mount her Lapith warriors as a show of strength. Perhaps the story of the Centauromachy was a metaphor explaining why these fantastic beast-men no longer lived in Archaic and Ancient Greece. But perhaps, too, they were something else altogether which we haven’t yet uncovered in all our digging and reconstruction of the past.
We’ll never know for certain whether Hippodamia and Pirithous lived, or what happened during their wedding feast. We’ll never know for certain how Theseus came to marry his Amazon bride, or if they existed at all to marry. We’ll never know what life was truly like in the Greek Bronze Age for those who lived within it. But the more I learn about this fascinating time, the more I think they weren’t so different from you or me. Even during the Bronze Age, people were still just people, and if there is one thing the myths make more than clear, it’s that even the greatest hero-kings and -queens often made mistakes—and maybe we only want to believe they aren’t the same kind of mistakes we’re still making today.
As always, if you’re interested in learning more about my research and the myths that inspired the books you’ve read, there’s plenty more on my website www.amaliacarosella.com, including links to sources and articles within a variety of blogposts. And if you loved Tamer of Horses, or any of my other books, please do consider leaving a review, or subscribe to my newsletter, The Amaliad, to stay up to date on future works from Authors!Me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
photo © 2015 Thomas G. Hale
Amalia Carosella began as a biology major before taking La
tin and falling in love with old heroes and older gods. After that, she couldn’t stop writing about them, with the occasional break for more contemporary subjects. She graduated with a BA in Classical Studies as well as English from the University of North Dakota. A former bookseller and an avid reader, she is fascinated by the Age of Heroes and Bronze Age Greece, though anything Viking Age or earlier is likely to capture her attention. She maintains a blog relating to classical mythology and the Bronze Age at www.amaliacarosella.com and can also be found writing fantasy under the name Amalia Dillin at www.amaliadillin.com. Today, she lives with her husband in Upstate New York and dreams of the day she will own goats (and maybe even a horse, too).
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