Centaurs

Centaurs descend from Ixion, who tried to seduce Hera and was given a cloud in her shape instead; the union produced the centaur line, and Ixion himself was bound to a burning wheel forever. The parentage matters, because the Greeks used centaurs to think about what happens when appetite is not governed.

As a race they are drunk, violent and incapable of holding it together at a party. The Centauromachy — the brawl at the wedding of Pirithous, where the centaur guests got at the wine and tried to carry off the bride — was carved on the Parthenon itself, standing in for civilisation against everything that is not.

Chiron is the exception, and pointedly not one of them by blood. He is a son of Kronos, who took the form of a horse, which makes him an immortal Titan's child rather than a cloud's descendant. He was wise, skilled in medicine and music, and tutored an implausible roster: Achilles, Jason, Asclepius, Actaeon, and in several accounts Heracles.

His end is the cruellest accident in Greek myth. Heracles, fighting other centaurs, loosed a Hydra-poisoned arrow that struck Chiron by mistake. Being immortal he could not die of a wound that would not heal, so he was left in permanent agony. He gave his immortality to Prometheus in exchange for release, and Zeus set him in the sky as a constellation.

The word 'chiral' has nothing to do with him, but 'Chiron' does survive in medicine: surgery and chiropractic take their root from the Greek for hand, the same root as his name, which the Greeks connected to his healing.