Satyr

The satyrs were born from the daughters of Hecaterus, a rustic god of the dance, according to the ancient poet Hesiod, who lived in the eighth century BCE. In the fragmentary Catalogue of Women, Hesiod tells how the five granddaughters of Phoroneus, the first man of the Peloponnese, gave birth to three kinds of wild spirits: the Oreads, the nymphs of the mountains; the Kouretes, the armed dancers who guarded the infant Zeus; and the satyrs, whom Hesiod called worthless and unfit for work, a breed of pranksters and layabouts. Other stories say they were the sons of Hermes, the messenger god who moved between Olympus and the mortal world with winged sandals, and the nymph Iphthime, or that they sprang from the earth itself like mushrooms after rain. However they came to be, the satyrs had no mothers among their own kind, for there were no female satyrs in Greek mythology. They were all male, all wild, and all perpetually hungry for wine, music, and the company of nymphs, the female nature spirits who haunted the same forests and streams.

In their earliest form, the satyrs were part horse. They had the ears and tails of horses, snub noses, and receding hairlines that made them look comically ugly. They were not goat-legged in the beginning, that transformation came later, when the god Pan, the goat-foot lord of Arcadia who played the panpipes and chased nymphs through the mountains, became so famous that artists began to give the satyrs his legs and horns. By the fifth century BCE, the satyrs of Athenian vase paintings had become goat-men, with shaggy haunches, pointed ears, and small horns poking through their curls. They were always naked, always erect, always ready to dance or fight or couple with whatever moved. Their leader was Silenus, the oldest and fattest of the satyrs, a bald, round-bellied drunkard who rode on a donkey because his own legs could no longer hold him up. Silenus was the foster father and tutor of Dionysus, the god of wine, and he knew secrets that sober men could never learn, though he revealed them only when captured and forced to speak.

The satyrs lived in the retinue of Dionysus, the Olympian god whose worship drove men and women into ecstatic madness. When Dionysus travelled from the east, from the lands beyond the Hellespont, he brought with him a procession of satyrs, maenads, and sileni. The maenads were the wild women who tore animals apart with their bare hands and danced until they collapsed, while the satyrs played the aulos, a double-reed flute whose wailing sound could drive a man to tears or frenzy. Together they moved through the forests at night, drinking wine from leather skins, chasing nymphs, and celebrating the god who had taught them to forget the boundaries between human and beast, sanity and madness. In one famous story, the satyrs accompanied Dionysus on his campaign against India, a mythic expedition that took the wine god to the edges of the known world. The satyrs fought with thyrsi, staffs wrapped in ivy and vine leaves, and their battle cries were indistinguishable from their songs.

The satyrs were not merely creatures of myth, they were also creatures of the theater. In Athens, at the festival of the Great Dionysia, three tragic plays were followed by a satyr play, a short, bawdy comedy that mocked the very stories the tragedies had just told with solemn reverence. The chorus of these plays was made up of men dressed as satyrs, wearing horse tails, padded bellies, and exaggerated phalluses, their faces masked with snub noses and pointed ears. The only complete satyr play to survive is the Cyclops by Euripides, in which Odysseus, the clever hero of the Trojan War whose ten-year voyage home became the subject of Homer's Odyssey, encounters the one-eyed giant Polyphemus. In Euripides' version, Odysseus is accompanied by a chorus of satyrs led by Silenus, who are slaves of the giant and desperate to steal Odysseus's wine. The play is crude, hilarious, and strangely touching, a reminder that even in the darkest stories, there is room for laughter. The word satire, though its etymology is debated, may owe something to these plays, where the satyrs mocked everything, including the gods themselves.

In later ages, the satyrs became symbols of the dangers of excess. Early Christians, seeking to discredit the pagan gods, conflated the satyrs with demons, their goat legs and horns becoming the template for the devil in medieval art. The god Pan, who looked so like a satyr, was said to have died at the coming of Christ, and his followers were cast as creatures of hell. But the satyrs also survived as figures of fun, appearing in Renaissance paintings as drunken companions of Bacchus, the Roman name for Dionysus. In the nineteenth century, the poet John Keats wrote of the satyr in his Ode to a Nightingale, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters filled their canvases with goat-legged men chasing nymphs through impossible forests. Today, the satyr lives on in fantasy literature and role-playing games, a creature of the wilderness that reminds us that civilisation is a thin veneer, and that beneath it, the music of the aulos still plays, the wine still flows, and the dance never truly ends.