Umbridge's Rape (Was: Is Umbridge a Half-Breed???)

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 78388

Jazmyn wrote:
> 
> I have found no source in mythology to suggest that there are no female 
> centaurs.  Please provide some sort of proof for this. (ie. What book 
> did you find this in.  And no, Piers Anthony's Xanth is not acceptable 
> as a source for Greek Myth)
> 
> I would suspect that centaurs are so suspicious of humans that they do 
> not allow their females to be seen by them. You don't see foals in
their 
> 'war party' that greets humans either.
> 
> The most solid evidence that the centaurs didn't rape her is that its a 
> CHILDREN'S BOOK.  They would never publish it.
> 
> Besides, its SATYRS, not centaurs that supposedly were all males and 
> they mated with the 'all female' wood nymphs and anything else that 
> would  hold still long enough.  In Greek Myth, only one centaur
tried to 
> run off with a woman (Hercules wife) and was killed.

That's incorrect, actually -- there's several myths that feature
centaur's raping or attempting to rape human women, the wedding of
Pirithous being the most famous: 
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/c/centaurs.html .  According to
Apollodorus, the mythological athlete Atlanta killed two centaurs,
Rhoecus and Hylaeus, who attempted to rape her.  For a loooong list of
centaur names, click here:
http://homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/CENTAURS.html

The existence of female centaurs is left up in the air until quite
late in the classical period: 
http://hometown.aol.com/jwfvase2/page/centauress.html .  Chiron, at
least had a human (well, nymph) mother.  The close association of
satyrs and centaurs is explained a bit more here:
http://hometown.aol.com/jwfvase2/page/dionysian.html#miscellaneous . 
As to how centaurs reproduce, it's not certain that they do (according
to one version of the Greeks, anyhow)-- they were created under
bizzare circumstances by a cloud.

The 'nice' image of centaurs, at least from my own experience, comes
from the fact that the only centaur myth we learn at school or in
kid's greek myth books is the one about the gentle, learned Chiron. 
But Chiron (like Firenze!) was very much the exception to the general
idea of centaurs.

RE:  Children's book-- that's a good reason why it wouldn't be on the
page, necessarily, but there's plenty of horrible stuff going on in
the series off-stage.  Longbottoms tortured into insanity?  And what
were the Death Eaters doing to Muggle women, do you think?  I think
JKR deliberately left it ambiguous, so people could imagine whatever
they could handle.

-- Sydney (raving Classics geek)