satyrs and silens
satyrs and silensare imaginary male inhabitants of the wild, comparable to the ‘wild men’ of the European folk tradition, with some animal features, unrestrained in their desire for sex and wine, and generally represented naked. The first mention in literature of ‘silens’ is as making love to nymphs in caves (Hymn. Hom. Ven 262–3); of ‘satyrs’ it is as ‘worthless and mischievous’ (Hesiod fr. 123). On the Attic Franois vase (c.570 BC) the horse–human hybrids accompanying Hephaestus (with Dionysus) back to Mt. Olympus are labelled as silens. It seems that in the course of the 6th cent. bc the (Attic-Ionic) silens were amalgamated with the (Peloponnesian) satyrs (so that the names were used interchangeably) to form, along with nymphs or maenads, the sacred band (thiasos) of Dionysus. It is a thiasos of young satyrs that, in the 5th cent., forms the chorus of satyric...
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