hippotaur

plural hippotaurs

1. A creature that is half bull and half horse.

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

   1999 January 29, Heliodorus (of Emesa.), edited by Moses Hadas, Heliodorus: An Ethiopian Romance, reprint edition, University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, page 267

   4 more examples

   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.

   1982 May 1, Graham Anderson, Eros Sophistes: Ancient Novelists at Play, number 9, Scholars Press, →ISBN, page 37

   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.

   2014 July 14, Shadi Bartsch, “FIVE. The Other Descriptions: Relation to Narrative and Reader”, in Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description in Heliodorus and Achilles Tatius, reprint edition, Princeton University Press, →ISBN, page 148

   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.

   2019 May 7, B. P. Reardon, “Heliodorus AN ETHIOPIAN STORY”, in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 2 edition, Univ of California Press, →ISBN, page 675

   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).

   2023 May 4, Marília Futre Pinheiro, Massimo Fusillo, Stephen A. Nimis, “Animals as a Means of Characterisation in Heliodorus Aethiopica”, in Modern Literary Theory and the Ancient Novel: Poetics and Rhetoric, volume 30, Barkhuis, →ISBN, page 119

   Synonyms: jumart

plural hippotaurs

1. slanglifestyleA taur with the lower body of a hippopotamus.