Isidore refers to a creature called the Onocentaur, “which has the shape of a man down to the waist, and behind has the make of an ass.”
As the centaurs are frequently represented as bearing bows and arrows, the Sagittarius of the heralds (such, for instance, as that assigned as the armorial bearing of King Stephen or the sign of the Zodiac of the same name) is ordinarily represented in this half-human, half-equine form, though it is, of course, obvious on a moment’s consideration of the real meaning and derivation of the word, that this is but a narrow and arbitrary limitation, and that Robin Hood, for example, or William Tell, to say nothing of “A, the archer that shot at a frog,” might as readily, in fact, be called a Sagittarius as any Thessalian centaur.
Other partly human, partly animal forms often found in classic art and literature are those of the Satyrs and the Fauns. The satyrs are represented as having bristly hair, ears sharply pointed like those of animals, low sensual faces, small horns growing out of the top of the forehead, and a tail like that of a horse or goat. These satyrs, Greek in their conception, are often confounded with the fauns of the Romans, creatures half-man and half-goat, the head, like that of the satyrs, being horned. Our readers will doubtless recall the lines in “Hamlet:”—
“So excellent a king, that was to this,
Hyperion to a satyr.”
These woodland sprites, as attendants on Pan, Bacchus, and Silenus, are often represented in classic art, and were a firm article of belief in those early ages. Thorwaldsen and other modern sculptors have also introduced them in their work, and they were often a feature in the quaint processions of the Guilds of the Middle Ages.[17]
The Harpys, three in number, were creatures employed, according to the belief of the Greeks and Romans, by the higher gods as the instruments for the punishment of the crimes of men. Their bodies were those of vultures, their heads those of women, and it was their evil property to contaminate everything they touched. They are not infrequently represented in classic art; several examples of their introduction may be seen on vases in the British Museum, and notably on some bas-reliefs from a monument brought from Xanthus, in Lycia, and commonly, from the subjects of these sculptures, called the Harpy Tomb—a monument dating probably from about the sixth century before the Christian era. Homer mentions but one harpy, Hesiod gives two, but all later writers mention three. Milton refers to these creatures in his “Paradise Lost,” Book II., in the lines:—
“Thither by harpy-footed Furies hal’d
At certain revolutions all the damn’d are brought.”
Shakespeare, too, in his “Much Ado About Nothing,” Act ii. scene 1, mentions the creature, though in a more indirect way, using the word, as we from time to time find it employed elsewhere, as typical of one who wants to seize on everything and get people into his own power—“a regular harpy.” Another reference will be found in the third scene in the third act of the “Tempest,” where Ariel in the midst of thunder and lightning enters as a harpy and addresses those before him as follows:—“I have made you mad.... I and my fellows are ministers of fate.” In “Pericles,” again, Act iv. scene 4, we find Cleon exclaiming—