Satyrs in Greek mythology: Dionysus' horse-tailed companions

Satyrs are the hybrid nature spirits of Greek mythology who follow Dionysus, the god of wine. In early Greek art they are men with horse ears, horse tails and snub noses, usually bearded and often shown aroused; from the Hellenistic period on they take on more goat-like features and blur into Pan and the Roman fauns. Lazy, drunk and forever chasing nymphs, they stand for the animal, pleasure-seeking side of the Dionysian world. They also matter well beyond the caricature: they gave their name to the satyr play, one of the three dramatic genres of Athens, and one of them, Marsyas, dared to challenge Apollo.

What is a satyr?

A satyr is neither a god nor a monster. It does not threaten the world as Typhon does, and no hero is sent to kill it. Satyrs live on the edges, in mountains and woods, and their animal traits point to appetite rather than danger. They drink, dance, play the aulos, pursue nymphs and run away the moment things turn serious.

They are often compared with the Centaurs, the other great man-horse hybrids of Greek myth, and the contrast helps. A centaur has a horse’s body topped by a human torso and stands for savage violence. A satyr is a man on two legs with a few equine features, and he is a buffoon, not a warrior. What the two share is that neither can handle wine.

Origins and family

“The worthless race of satyrs”

The oldest text to name satyrs is a fragment of the Catalogue of Women attributed to Hesiod, quoted by Strabo (10.3.19). It traces from one family line “the mountain nymphs, the race of worthless satyrs unfit for work, and the Curetes, sportive gods and dancers”. From their very first appearance, then, satyrs are defined by uselessness: they plant nothing and build nothing.

Silens and satyrs

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (262-263) speaks instead of silens, who mate with nymphs in the depths of caves along with Hermes. The two names originally covered almost the same creatures. On the famous François Vase, an Attic krater painted around 570 BCE and now in Florence, the horse-men escorting Hephaestus back to Olympus are labeled silenoi. Fifth-century Athenians preferred “satyrs” for the group and gradually reserved the name Silenus for one old, bald, pot-bellied satyr who became the tutor of Dionysus.

Sons of Silenus

The satyr play settled on a simple family tree: old Silenus is the father of the satyrs who make up the chorus. In Euripides’ Cyclops, Silenus and his sons were searching for Dionysus, kidnapped by pirates, when they were shipwrecked in Sicily and enslaved by the Cyclops Polyphemus. Later tradition kept this theatrical genealogy, although earlier sources give the satyrs no parents at all.

Satyrs and Dionysus

Together with the maenads, the women possessed by the god, satyrs form the thiasos, the noisy procession that follows Dionysus. Athenian vase painters show them treading grapes, hauling wineskins, dancing with castanets and pestering maenads, who often fend them off with the thyrsus. They escort the god when he brings Hephaestus back to Olympus, at his wedding to Ariadne, and on his campaigns; as late as the fifth century CE, Nonnus of Panopolis has them fighting in Dionysus’ army in India.

The satyrs work as a comic mirror of the god’s worshippers. The maenads experience Dionysian ecstasy as sacred and sometimes terrifying possession. The satyrs offer the slapstick version: wine, dancing and desire without the tragic cost.

Myths featuring satyrs

Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo

The most famous satyr is Marsyas. According to Apollodorus (1.4.2), he picked up the aulos that Athena had thrown away because playing it puffed out her cheeks, and grew so skilled that he challenged Apollo to a contest. Apollo played his lyre upside down and told Marsyas to do the same with his pipes, which was impossible. Having won, the god hung Marsyas from a pine tree and flayed him alive. Herodotus (7.26) says the satyr’s skin was still on display at Celaenae in Phrygia. Ovid (Metamorphoses, 6.382-400) makes the tears shed for him by fauns, satyrs and nymphs the source of the river Marsyas. Herodotus actually calls him “Marsyas the silen”, one more sign that the two names overlapped.

The satyr and Amymone

Apollodorus (2.1.4) tells how Amymone, one of the Danaids, was sent to find water in drought-stricken Argos. She threw a dart at a deer, hit a sleeping satyr instead, and the satyr woke and tried to rape her. Poseidon appeared, the satyr fled, and the god, after lying with Amymone himself, revealed the springs of Lerna to her. Aeschylus wrote a satyr play, now lost, on the episode.

Argus and the Arcadian satyr

A satyr could also be a real nuisance. Apollodorus (2.1.2) lists among the deeds of hundred-eyed Argus the killing of a satyr who was harassing the Arcadians and stealing their cattle.

Silenus and Midas

Old Silenus is at the center of the story of Midas. Herodotus (8.138) places his capture in the “gardens of Midas” in Macedonia, while Xenophon locates at Thymbrion in Phrygia the spring where the king made him drunk by mixing wine into the water. As a captive, Silenus offers a bleak piece of wisdom, usually summed up as: the best thing for a human is never to be born, and the second best is to die as soon as possible.

The satyr play: satyrs on stage

At the Great Dionysia in Athens, each tragic poet presented three tragedies followed by a satyr play, whose chorus was always made up of satyrs led by Silenus. Tradition credits Pratinas of Phlius with inventing the form in the late sixth century BCE. The formula was to drop the satyrs into a heroic myth and play it for laughs.

Three works give a clear idea of how this worked:

• Cyclops by Euripides, the only satyr play to survive complete, rewrites the Polyphemus episode of the Odyssey. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops while the satyrs, who promised to help, find excuses to back out at the critical moment.
• The Trackers (Ichneutae) by Sophocles, known from a long papyrus found at Oxyrhynchus and published in 1912, has the satyrs tracking the cattle stolen by the infant Hermes and panicking at the sound of the lyre he has just invented.
• The Net-Fishers (Dictyulci) by Aeschylus, surviving in fragments, has the satyrs haul ashore the chest in which Danaë and the baby Perseus are drifting.

The Pronomos Vase, an Attic krater of the late fifth century BCE now in Naples, shows an entire satyr-play cast backstage. The chorus members wear shaggy shorts fitted with a tail and a phallus and hold their satyr masks in their hands. It is one of the best pieces of evidence for Greek theatrical costume.

How the image of the satyr changed

From horse to goat

The archaic and classical satyr is horse-like: horse ears, a horse tail and sometimes hooves. From the Hellenistic period on, satyrs get younger and more graceful, and their animal traits shrink to pointed ears and a stubby tail. At the same time, the influence of Pan, the goat-footed god of Arcadia, and his small look-alikes, the paniskoi, adds horns and goat legs. The Romans finished the merger by identifying satyrs with their own fauns, and it is this goat-legged satyr that the Renaissance and modern fantasy inherited.

Satyrs in sculpture

Praxiteles carved several young, languid satyrs in the fourth century BCE, known from Roman copies such as the Resting Satyr. Pausanias (1.20.1) tells the story of Phryne, who wanted to know which of the sculptor’s works he valued most. She had someone run in shouting that his workshop was on fire, and Praxiteles cried out that all was lost if the flames had reached his Satyr and his Eros. The Barberini Faun in Munich, from around 220 BCE, shows a satyr sprawled in drunken sleep, and the Dancing Satyr of Mazara del Vallo, a bronze hauled up by fishermen off Sicily in 1998, catches the whirl of ecstatic dance.

“Real” satyrs

A few ancient writers treated satyrs as a natural curiosity. Pausanias (1.23.5-6) records the tale of Euphemus the Carian, blown off course to remote islands called the Satyrides, home to red-haired men with horse tails; to get rid of them, the crew had to leave behind a foreign woman who was aboard. Plutarch (Life of Sulla, 27) reports that a satyr captured near Apollonia was brought before Sulla. It could only utter a cry somewhere between a neigh and a bleat, and Sulla, horrified, had it sent away.

What satyrs mean

Satyrs show what a human being would be without the city: a creature that does not work, has no self-control and follows no law but pleasure. Yet Greek culture did not reject them. It placed them beside a god, gave them an official slot in the theater, and made them the comic witnesses of its great myths. The satyr play, staged after three tragedies, reminded audiences that human life is not only tragic, and that laughter, drink and the body are also part of what Dionysus gives.

What the ancient sources say

• Hesiod (fr. 123 M-W, in Strabo): the earliest mention, “the race of worthless satyrs”.
• Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (262-263): silens mate with nymphs in caves.
• Herodotus: Marsyas’ skin at Celaenae (7.26) and the capture of Silenus in the gardens of Midas (8.138).
• Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus: the satyr play, with Cyclops, The Trackers and The Net-Fishers.
• Apollodorus: Marsyas (1.4.2), the satyr killed by Argus (2.1.2) and Amymone’s satyr (2.1.4).
• Ovid (Metamorphoses, book 6): the death of Marsyas and the birth of his river.
• Pausanias and Plutarch: Phryne’s trick, the Satyrides islands, and Sulla’s satyr.

Further reading

For the god they follow, read Dionysus, then Pan, with whom the satyrs eventually merged. The story of Midas explains the figure of Silenus, and the Cyclops page picks up Euripides’ play. The Centaurs are the other great man-horse hybrids of Greek myth. For the full picture, see the Greek mythology hub.