The Centaur’s Feast
Come, come, be every one officious To make this banquet; which I wish may prove More stern and bloody than the Centaurs' feast.
- Titus, Act 5 Scene 2
The “Centaur’s feast” is a reference to yet another tale, of rape, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 12). This tale is of the battle that took place between the Centaurs and Lapiths during a wedding feast.
The Centaurs were a tribe of half-man, half-horse savages. A primitive race that made their homes in caves, hunted wild animals for food and armed themselves with rocks and tree branches.
The Lapiths invited the Centaur’s (I am not sure why) to the wedding feast of Pirithous and Hippodamia and when the bride entered, Eurytus one of the most bestial of the Centaurs, who was also drunk, lusted for the bride and attempted to abduct her. Other Centaurs followed suit grabbing the women closest to them. A bloody and gruesome battle ensued. Here’s some of the gore:
“He fell backwards, drumming his feet on the blood-soaked earth, gouts of blood spurting from mouth and wound equally, along with brain-matter and wine.”
One person wields a chandelier “as one wields a sacrificial axe to break the bull’s snowy neck, he dashed it against the forehead of Celadon, the Lapith, leaving him with the bones of his face crushed past recognition. His eyes leapt from their sockets, and his nose, pushed in, as the bones of his face shattered, was driven into his palate.”
Another “found the equivalent of a spear in a stag’s antlers that hung on a tall pine tree, as a votive offering. Gryneus was pierced in the eyes by the twin branches, and his eyeballs gouged out, one of which stuck to the horn, and the other slipped down onto his beard, and hung there in a clot of blood.”
Another’s hair gets set alight “The hair flared like a dry cornfield, set alight by the quick flames, and the blood seared in the wound gave out a terrible sizzling noise, as a bar of iron is prone to do, when the smith takes it, red-hot, from the fire, with curved tongs, and plunges it into a bath of water: it whistles and hisses immersed in the bubbling liquid.”
And the gore continues…. So Titus is fairly intent on a gruesome banquet when he references the Centaur’s feast.
To read the tale from Ovid: http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph12.htm#486225990