Red-figure painting on an Apulian crater (350-340 B.C.), now in the British Museum, London. The scene shows a Centaur trying to abduct Hippodamia, during her marriage with Pirithous. The latter was the king of the Lapiths of Thessaly and had invited the Centaurs, inhabiting that region, to his wedding feast. The horse-men, inebriated by the wine and incapable to control their own impulses, tried to abduct the young bride. Pirithous, helped by the Athenian hero Theseus, dashed against the Centaurs, who fought only with stones and tree-trunks, and vanquished them. The episode of the Lapiths’ fight against the Centaurs was frequently represented in Greek art and occurred on the sculptured friezes of the temple of Zeus in Olympia. Though the Greek sources did not give much information on this, Dumézil believed that the Centaurs could derive from ancient masquerades taking place during ceremonies, particularly those associated with the winter solstice, during which groups of youth went through the villages, indulging in jokes and intoxicated by wine, and ritually assaulted the women that were attending, as propitiatory acts of fertility (Dumézil 1929; Schnapp 1981).

[Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perithoos_Hippodameia_BM_VaseF272.jpg]