I also have a minor, probably unanswerable, side question. If I remember correctly, the mythological centaur character Chiron was famed for his wisdom and mentorship. But I've heard that the idea of centaurs was inspired by Greek interactions with nomadic steppe peoples like the Scythians. I thought that the Greeks disdained foreigners like the Scythians as 'uncivilized barbarians,' so how did a centaur become an ironically wise and respected character?
This doesn't answer your question, as it is a Roman perspective, not a Greek one, and is from an Epicurean, who believed in a more secular universe, but I think you'd be interested in Lucretius' 1st century BCE point of view:
But Centaurs never existed at all, nor at any time can creatures with a double nature and two-fold body exist composed of unlike sorts of limbs, so that the power of this and that stock could be sufficiently equal. This can be understood no matter how dull one's mind from what follows:
First, the horse is at the peak of his energy when three years have gone round, a boy not at all, for even then he will seek the milky nipples of his mother's breasts in his sleep. Later when in old age the solid strength and weary limbs of horses give out as life flees, only then in the flowering of childhood does early manhood begin and provide the cheeks with a covering of soft down— so you don't by chance believe that Centaurs can be put together or made from a human and the seed of burden-bearing horses, or that Scyllas exist with bodies that are semi-marine in nature, girded with frenzied dogs, and other things of their type, whose limbs we see are in complete disagreement with each other.
On the Nature of Things, 5.878-894, translated by Walter Englert.
Obviously you'd ideally be looking for a much earlier source for contrast, from before when secular philosophy was as commonplace. I hope someone posts a more relevant Greek text!
Good question. I'll just mention that "The Ancient Greeks" are a group that spans a lot of geography and chronology, and they didn't see themselves as "The Greeks" for a lot of it.
Plutarch* tells us that Alexander the Great (believes that he) saw the tomb of Achilles at Troy when he was conquering Asia in 334. If he believed in Achilles, the mythological figure, the guy who can yell so loud that it kills twelve trojans in the 18th book of the Iliad, it's not out of the question that he also believed that Achilles' mother was an immortal sea nymph, and that he had been raised by the centaur Chiron. And this from the guy who was tutored by Aristotle.
As always, we have to question the authenticity of Plutarch, both because he wasn't a writer of 'history' as we understand it, and because he was writing in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, 300+ years after Alexander lived.
*Then, going up to Ilium, he sacrificed to Athena and poured libations to the heroes. 8 Furthermore, the gravestone of Achilles he anointed with oil, ran a race by it with his companions, naked, as is the custom, and then crowned it with garlands, pronouncing the hero happy in having, while he lived, a faithful friend, and after death, a great herald of his fame. 9 As he was going about and viewing the sights of the city, someone asked him if he wished to see the lyre of Paris. "For that lyre," said Alexander, "I care very little; but I would gladly see that of Achilles, to which he used to sing the glorious deeds of brave men.
The canonical treatment of the broader question underlying this one is the book Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths by Paul Veyne. It is a very interesting (although somewhat disorganized) short book (more of a very long essay) on the nature of mythological and historical truth.
To simplify greatly, Veyne argues that:
Most Greeks believed the mythical heroes and monsters to be 'true' in a sense but to belong to another, higher, purer, realm of existence which was separate from the mundane world in which they lived. (If someone claimed to have met a centaur, they probably would not have beent taken very seriously.)
Many Greek philosophers and historians did not believe in the literal existence of their gods or the more outlandish parts of their mythology (centaurs, minautors etc.) at all. But nor did they see myths (as we tend today) simply as fictions that bear the imprint of ideology (like elves and orcs). Rather, they tended to assume that all myths contained a kernel of narrative truth, which superstitious people had surrounded with fanciful accretions. So for example, Aristotle rationalizes the myth of the minotaur as a distorted account of the abduction by the Cretans of a group of Athenian youths.
Source: Paul Veyne, trans. Paul Wissing, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago 1988)
EDIT: Some illustrative quotations from Veyne, including specific reference to centaurs:
For Greek mythology, whose connections with religion were very loose,was basically nothing but a very popular literary genre, a vast realm of literature, mainly oral in character-if, indeed, the term 'literature' can be applied when the distinction between fiction and reality had yet to be made and the legendary element was serenely accepted.
[The Greek myths] took place ''earlier,'' during the heroic generations, when the gods still tookpart in human affairs. Mythological space and time were secretly difft:r.ent from our own. A Greek put the gods "in heaven," but he would have been astounded to see them in the sky.
The general public believed in the reality of Centaurs and accepted the legend of Heracles or Dionysus with an uncritical spirit.
[Quoting Diodorus]: "When the histories of myths are concerned, a man should, by no means scrutinize the truth with so sharp an eye. In the theatres, for instance, though we are persuaded there have existed no Centaurs who are composed of two different kinds of bodies nor any Geryones with three bodies, yet we look with favour upon such products of the myths as these, and by our applause we enhance the honour of the god."
When [Galen] is speaking as a scholar and laying out his personal theories, he speaks ofthe Centaurs in terms that imply thatforhimself and his most select readers these marvelous beings had barely any present reality. Medicine, he says, teaches reasonable knowledge, or "theorems," and the first condition of a good theorem is that it be perceivable by the senses. "For, if the theorem is unrealizable, in the manner of the following statement, The centaur's bile relieves apoplexy, it is useless because it escapes our apperception." There are no Centaurs , or at least no one has ever seen one.
The Greeks offer the example of a millennial failure to tear themselves away from a lie. They were never able to say, "Myth is completely false, since it rests on nothing. " [..] The imaginary itself is never challenged, as if some secret sense of foreboding warned that, if it were, no more truths would remain . Either people forget the myths of olden times in order to speak ofother things and enter a different imaginative domain, or else they absolutely want to find the kernel of truth that lies hidden in myth or makes it speak.
The ancient Greeks of the Classical era (6th to 4th Century BCE) believed that while mythological characters like heroes, centaurs, titans and nymphs had existed and mingled with men in some long-ago time (the Age of Heroes), they did not do so anymore. Orestes, son of Agamemnon was viewed as the last hero, dating to shortly after the Trojan War (c.1100 BCE in Greek estimation).
In reference to your second question:
I don't know how the centaur became ironically wise and respected creature, as seen in [Harry Potter] (http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Centaur), but certainly in the Classical period centaurs were used to represent the uncivilised foreigner, frequently in a story known as the Centauromachy.
In one popular version of the Centauromachy, Pirithoos, king of the Lapiths, is to marry Hippodamia. The Centaurs were invited to the festivities by the Lapiths, but, being quite unused to the effects of wine, became hopelessly inebriated. They began groping the female guests and even some of the young boys, resulting in a drunken brawl against the Lapiths and the hero Theseus, a good friend of Perithoos.
This struggle between the civilised and barbaric (here represented by the Lapiths vs. Centaurs, but also see the Titanomachy, Gigantomachy and Amazonomachy) became especially popular after expulsion of the Persians from mainland Greece, following horrors of the invasion and destruction of Athens in 480-79, and is exemplified by the [architectural sculpture of the Parthenon] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon#Sculpture).
To answer your main question, I'm sure there were some people who believed in centaurs but I'm sure many more did not. As has already been noted, one has to bear in mind ancient Greece was a myriad of different peoples, and the example I have given of the Parthenon metopes is very much from a heavily politicised, 5th century BC Athenian view. I am currently reading Thucydides, who was writing not long after the Parthenon was built, and I can tell you without any doubt he would have scoffed at the idea of centaurs, but that is not to say belief in centaurs did not exist in the 5th century!
On an interesting side note, one of the regions they supposedly inhabited was the heavily wooded [Pelion peninsular] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelion), which is unusually devoid of classical remains but genuinely one of the most beautiful parts of Greece to visit if you ever get a chance.
But I've heard that the idea of centaurs was inspired by Greek interactions with nomadic steppe peoples like the Scythians. I thought that the Greeks disdained foreigners like the Scythians as 'uncivilized barbarians,' so how did a centaur become an ironically wise and respected character?
Well Chiron was said to be different from the other centaurs, which were rowdy, aggressive and slow-witted.
I've also heard that Chiron is an amalgamation of different mythological figures. That he was a foreign god which was assimilated into the Pantheon and merged with a legendary teacher figure.
On Empedocles:
The poet continues with a fusion of scientific insight that rivals Darwin and a mad creation of a world that matches Blake, to explain how, as things became separated, "heads without shoulders, bodies with no limbs" appeared and fell (as Leonard translates it) "down awful heights of Air" Love still retains some power, and we picture these various organs meeting and recombining by pure chance in a matrix of monstrous and arbitrary organic collage. There result "men with bulls' heads," and so on, the minotaurs, centaurs, sphinxes, sirens, and chimeras of Greek mythology now appear as lost species, in what seems to be an account of natural selection.
On Centaurs:
In Greek myth, centaurs had occupied the wild regions of Thessaly and Arcadia in the old days; they represented the uncivilized life, before the general establishment of Greek laws and city-states (see story of Perithoos in the Illiad)
I personally think mythical anthropomorphic creatures were part of the psyche at the time. The Egyptian nation and their Sphinx had been around for thousands of years before Greece. Also, oral mystical faiths like Orphism; Orpheus is attributed with the Theogeny and in it he reincarnates/transmigrates into a swan. King Minos and the Minotaur, allusions with a fabled King Minos who is also a judge in Heaven; Crete Bull worship during the Bronze Age. The idea of ones soul becoming one with animals seems to come from these early religious beliefs. I think its possible finding fantastic skeletons might have sparked explanations of mythical creatures and how they are extinct (Empedocles) vs an understanding of the millions of years of evolution that connects us all.
So I do think people like Empedocles may or may not have believed in centaurs [I find the more educated the Philosopher, the more they rejected myth, and explored more deist interpretation), but he was obviously using his [poetic] philosophy to explain how centaurs and other mythical creatures came to exist. So their must have been some common belief in these mythical creatures.