History of Monsters. 33

in his *Institutes*, where he states: “If anyone stipulates for something that does not exist in nature, or cannot exist—such as a deceased man named Titius, whom he believed to be alive, or a Hippocentaur, which is an impossibility—the agreement shall be void.”

Marcus Tullius Cicero adopts this same stance in his *Tusculan Disputations*, where he argues quite freely that Centaurs never existed.

Therefore, when it is told that Centaurs once lived in Thessaly and that the Lapiths believed them to be such creatures, we should understand from Servius’s commentaries on Virgil that the truth of the matter is this: because the practice of taming horses was first

Another species of Centaur.