Hippotaur

Cnemon is surprised even by the shadow of a crocodile, while Nausicles smiles at a foolish bird-catcher sent to catch the phoenicopter; or the giraffe terrifies the Ethiopians at a point in the plot when surprise is least expected - before Theagenes improvises a hippotaur to deal with it. This is again the world of Herodotus-at-the-Zoo.

Theagenes was extolled to the skies for having welded the novel team into a hippotaur.

Hence, we have a Thessalian doing battle not with a man-horse (centaur) but with a bull-horse (hippotaur), and although the analogy has its weaknesses, it is certainly suggestive of the earlier fight.

So precisely did he correlate the speed of the two racing animals animals that from a distance the two heads sprang from a single neck, and they acclaimed Theagenes as a hero who had brought so strange a team, a hippotaur, a creature half bull, half horse, beneath the yoke.

The striking image of his horse in parallel to the bull so that they look like a hybrid animal, a hippotaur, governed by one man (29,5), makes true the image of the Lapiths defeating the hybrid Centaurs pictured on his mantle (3,3,5).