Αἰολοκένταυρος

Notes

1. Same entry, Adler reports, in the Ambrosian Lexicon. The headword is otherwise unattested (and ignored by LSJ) except in Lucian, who invents this nonsense name for a character in the battle of the floating islands: True Histories (Verae Historiae) 1.40-42, at 42 (three times in all there). One of the 90-metre-tall giants with flames as hair, he commands the victorious "navy" of islands, using their forests as sails in the wind.
   It may be part of the humour that there is no way of telling which of the many senses of ai)o/los (alphaiota 253) is appropriate to the giant. Perhaps it applies to his horse-half, as 'swift' or 'swift-circling' (cf. alphaiota 251). More likely, it is already used in the sense of ai)olo/morfos, so common in the Orphic Hymns (4.7, 12.3, 15.10, 32.11, 36.12, 39.5, 50.5, 60.5, 69.8) for the power of heroes and gods to undergo metamorphosis; cf. our were-wolf.