Lapiths (Ἄργισσα) — a Homeric kingdom of the Odyssey, c. 1200 BC

Lapiths — The Centaur-tamers of Pelion — two oaks at the gate who both came home.

The Lapith realm of northern Thessaly, seated at Argissa, sent forty ships to Troy under Polypoites and Leonteus. Both chiefs survived the war and returned home — a rare unbroken nostos among the Achaean kings.

Leader at Troy: Polypoites.

Ruler in the Odyssey's present: Polypoites.

Role in the Trojan War: Achaean. Forty ships from Thessaly under Polypoites and Leonteus, who held the wall against Asios in Iliad 12 and rode inside the Wooden Horse at the fall of Troy.

The homecoming: Both chiefs lived and came home — Polypoites rules Argissa still.

Northward in Thessaly, on the tilth where the Peneios runs, lay the Lapith country — Argissa the seat, and with it Gyrtone, Orthe, Elone, and "the white city of Olooson." These were no soft farmers but the folk of the Lapithae, the mountain-taming stock that once drove the "shaggy wild folk" — the Centaurs — from wooded Pelion. Their two captains were Polypoites, whom "famed Hippodameia conceived of Peirithoos on that day when he took vengeance of the shaggy wild folk," and Leonteus "of the stock of Ares, son of high-hearted Koronos Kaineus' son." Forty black ships they led to Troy for the cause of Agamemnon of MYC, the anax to whom all Achaia answered.\n\nTheir deed at Troy was defence, and no contingent held a wall better. When Asios son of Hyrtakos drove his chariot straight at the Achaean gate, thinking to burst through to the ships, he found the two Lapiths planted before it — and could not move them. Homer gives them the great oak simile of the twelfth book: they stood "like high-crested oak trees in the hills, that for ever abide the wind and rain, firm fixed with roots great and long," then rushed out like tusked boars into the press. Polypoites smote Damasos clean through the bronze cheekpiece so the brain burst within, then killed Pylon and Ormenos; Leonteus struck down Hippomachos, then with the sword took Antiphates, Menon, Iamenos, and Orestes one after another to the earth. Asios groaned and cursed Zeus that two men alone would not yield him the gate. It is one of the finest small stands in the whole war.\n\nTheir strength was an inheritance of the oldest heroic age. Nestor of PYL, chiding Agamemnon and Achilles in the first book, names the mightiest men he ever fought beside — "Peirithoos and Dryas shepherd of the host and Kaineus and Exadios and godlike Polyphemos and Theseus son of Aigeus" — the very fathers and forebears of these two Lapith lords. Peirithous, Polypoites' sire, was the sworn brother of Theseus of ATH, and their Centaur-war at the wedding-feast (told again in the Odyssey, where drunken Eurytion loses ears and nostrils to the pitiless sword and the "feud between the Centaurs and mankind" is born) is the founding legend of the house. So the Lapith realm is bound by blood and battle-friendship to both Pylos and Athens.\n\nAt the end the pair went into the dark belly of the Horse. Quintus counts "Polypoetes golden-haired" and "Leonteus staunch" among the chosen few Epeios sealed inside the carven beast — so their hands were in the sack of Troy itself, not only its siege.\n\nAnd their nostos, unlike so many, is a homecoming. Where Agamemnon came back to the axe and Aias of LOC drowned in his pride, both Lapith chiefs lived. Apollodorus records that Leonteus and Polypoetes, with Kalchas and others, would not trust the sea: they "left their ships in Ilium and journeyed by land to Colophon" — and so came home. At the dramatic present, ten years into the returns, Polypoites rules in Argissa unharmed, one of the rare kings for whom the war cost neither life nor throne. In a world of murdered lords and lost fleets, the sons of the Centaur-tamers simply endured, as their oaks endure the wind and the rain.

“These twain stood in front of the lofty gates, like high-crested oak trees in the hills, that for ever abide the wind and rain, firm fixed with roots great and long.” — Iliad 12.131