Centaurs Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Centaurs trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This centaurs trivia quiz gallops from Thessaly to the edge of the solar system. The easy questions are ones anyone who knows a little mythology could answer: what a centaur is made of, the wise centaur who tutored Achilles, the poisoned shirt that killed Heracles, and the star system next door named for the constellation. The harder end is for classicists and stargazers: the cloud shaped like Hera that mothered the race, the wedding brawl with the Lapiths, the hero who beat the invulnerable Caeneus into the ground, why Chiron gave up his immortality and who was freed as a result, the jar of wine that started a massacre at Pholus's cave, the centauress who killed herself in Ovid, the ox-horned centaurs of Cyprus, the donkey and fish varieties of the bestiaries, the Venetian doge's barge, Botticelli's painting, the Parthenon metopes in London, the constellation with the brightest globular cluster, the ringed body found in 1977 that named a whole class of objects, and the rocket stage that first burned liquid hydrogen. Fantasia, Narnia, Harry Potter and Percy Jackson get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the myths, the artworks and the astronomy before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Greek mythology, mythical creatures and constellations quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which James Bond actor played the centaur Chiron in the 2010 film Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief?
Pierce Brosnan
Pierce Brosnan spends his first scenes as Mr. Brunner, Percy's Latin teacher, before the mild schoolmaster is revealed as Chiron, trainer of heroes at Camp Half-Blood.
Q 02Which Greek region was the centaurs' traditional home?
Thessaly
Thessaly's wooded mountains were the centaurs' country until they lost their great battle with a neighbouring tribe and were driven out, which is why later tales find them in the Peloponnese.
Q 03The centaurs were said to spring from Ixion's union with what, shaped by Zeus to look like Hera?
A cloud
A cloud: Zeus moulded it into Hera's likeness to test his guest, and Ixion, pardoned for murder and welcomed to the gods' table, walked straight into the trap.
Q 04Which lyric poet's ode for Hieron of Syracuse tells how Ixion fathered the centaur race?
Pindar
Pindar holds Ixion up to the tyrant as a warning: in his second Pythian ode the punished sinner calls out to all mortals to repay a benefactor with kindness.
Q 05What was Ixion's eternal punishment for lusting after Hera?
Bound to a spinning fiery wheel
Bound to a spinning fiery wheel, Ixion at first whirled across the sky; later tradition moved the wheel to the underworld. In one telling Zeus struck only after he boasted of bedding Hera.
Q 06Which Roman poet has Nestor recount the Lapith-centaur wedding brawl at length?
Ovid
Ovid gives the tale to Nestor in Metamorphoses 12 as an eyewitness: the old king, claiming more than two hundred years of life, says he was a wedding guest and fought the centaurs himself.
Q 07Which hero was smuggled as a newborn to Chiron's cave to hide him from his usurping uncle Pelias?
Jason
Jason: his parents staged a funeral, wailing as if the baby had died, and sent him away by night; after twenty years with the centaur he came home to claim the throne Pelias had seized.
Q 08The poet Nonnus wrote of horned centaurs born on which island when Aphrodite slipped from Zeus's grasp?
Cyprus
Cyprus was Aphrodite's own island, and in Nonnus's epic its soil bore the ox-horned centaurs when Zeus, eluded by the goddess, spilled his seed on the ground.
Q 09In which Pixar film is the mother of two elf brothers dating a centaur police officer called Colt Bronco?
Onward
Onward is set in a fantasy suburb where technology has made magic obsolete, so Colt Bronco patrols by police car, and the brothers, who dislike him, lead him on a mountain-road chase.
Q 10At which Lapith king's wedding, with his friend Theseus among the guests, did centaurs try to carry off the bride?
Pirithous
Pirithous had invited the centaurs as kin: he and they were both said to descend from Ixion, so the brawl over his bride Hippodamia was a family feud before it was a war.
Q 11How did the centaurs finally kill Caeneus, the Lapith hero no weapon could wound?
Buried him under tree trunks
Buried him under tree trunks: Caeneus was born a girl, Caenis, whom Poseidon turned at her own wish into a man no blade could pierce, so the centaurs smothered what they could not stab.
Q 12Which Renaissance artist carved the relief Battle of the Centaurs?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo carved it as a teenager under Lorenzo de' Medici's patronage and kept it all his life; in old age he said the sight of it made him regret every hour not given to sculpture.
Q 13Which museum holds fifteen of the Parthenon's carved panels of Lapiths battling centaurs?
The British Museum
Q 21How did the peaceful Pholus die?
Wounded by one of Heracles' venomous arrows
Wounded by one of Heracles' venomous arrows, but by accident: handling a spent one after the fight, Pholus cut himself and died, and his guest buried him at the foot of Mount Pholoe.
Q 22Which centaur tried to violate Heracles' wife Deianeira while ferrying her across a river?
Nessus
Nessus was killed for it, in most tellings by one of Heracles' arrows; dying, he told Deianeira his blood was a love charm, a lie that would one day kill the hero.
Q 23The shirt that killed Heracles was soaked in a centaur's blood tainted with which poison?
The British Museum has fifteen, removed by Lord Elgin's team in the early 1800s, when Athens was under Ottoman rule; Greece has long campaigned to bring the Parthenon sculptures home.
Q 14Scholars usually trace the centaur myth to a people's first sight of what?
Riders on horseback
Riders on horseback: to people who had never ridden, horse and rider could look like a single creature, the very mistake the Aztecs were reported to make on first meeting Spanish cavalry.
Q 15Which Titan fathered the centaur Chiron while in the shape of a stallion?
Cronus
Cronus sired him on the nymph Philyra, which made Chiron an immortal half-brother of Zeus and set him apart from the other centaurs, the unruly brood descended from Ixion.
Q 16Which god was said to have taught the young Chiron hunting and healing?
Apollo
Apollo and his sister Artemis were said to have schooled Chiron, and the lessons came full circle: Apollo later brought his own infant son Asclepius to the centaur to be raised as a healer.
Q 17Which hero of the Trojan War was handed over as a child to be raised by Chiron?
Achilles
Achilles was reared by the centaur, in Apollodorus's telling, on the innards of lions and wild boars and the marrow of bears instead of milk.
Q 18In one telling, whose release from punishment did Chiron buy by giving up his immortality?
Prometheus
Prometheus: in agony from a wound that would not heal, the immortal Chiron chose to die in his place, and the fire-thief chained for defying Zeus went free.
Q 19Which hero received an ash spear from Chiron at the wedding where Eris threw her golden apple?
Peleus
Peleus was given the spear at his wedding to the sea-nymph Thetis; it later went to Troy with his son, and Homer says no other Greek there could handle it.
Q 20What smell drove the centaurs mad and into Pholus's cave when Heracles visited?
Fragrant wine
Fragrant wine: in one telling the jar belonged to all the centaurs in common, so Pholus hesitated to open it, and when Heracles insisted the scent brought its owners charging to the cave.
The Lernaean Hydra's venom
The centaur's blood on the shirt carried the Lernaean Hydra's venom from the arrow that had killed him; Deianeira sent it to Heracles as a love charm, fearing he loved the captive Iole.
Q 24How does the centauress Hylonome die after her mate Cyllarus falls in the wedding battle?
On the spear that killed him
On the spear that killed him: she falls on it and dies holding him, a love story the poet sets amid the slaughter, pausing to show her combing her hair and wearing flowers to please him.
Q 25What is a centaur holding a bow called?
A sagittary
A sagittary shares its root with Sagittarius, Latin for archer, and Shakespeare sends a 'dreadful Sagittary' into battle against the Greeks in Troilus and Cressida.
Q 26Which swift-footed huntress shot dead the centaurs Rhoecus and Hylaeus when they tried to assault her?
Atalanta
Atalanta, abandoned at birth and suckled by a she-bear, grew up a hunter who was never without her bow; she went on to join the heroes of the Calydonian boar hunt.
Q 27Lynels, lion-headed centaur-like beasts with horns, are recurring enemies in which Nintendo game series?
The Legend of Zelda
The Legend of Zelda has used Lynels since its first game, whose manual warned that Link's little shield could not stop the creature's sword; in Breath of the Wild they are among the most powerful foes.
Q 28Which city's ruler sailed out each Ascension Day aboard the Bucentaur to 'marry' the sea by dropping a ring into it?
Venice
Venice's doge dropped the ring with the words 'We wed thee, sea'; the gilded state barge sailed for centuries until the French destroyed the last one in 1798, stripping it for its gold.
Q 29Which Florentine painted Pallas and the Centaur around 1482?
Botticelli
Botticelli shows the goddess hauling the centaur by a lock of his hair, read as virtue reining in animal instinct; her dress is patterned with the Medici's three-ring emblem, a clue to who ordered it.
Q 30In Dante's Inferno, centaurs patrol a river of boiling blood that punishes which sinners?
The violent
The violent stand in the blood, tyrants up to the eyebrows, and the centaurs shoot any who rise too high; their captain Chiron lends one of his troop to carry the living Dante across the ford.