Greek satyrs were part horse long before they became goat-legged fauns
Picture a satyr and you probably imagine goat legs and little horns. Ancient Greek artists drew something different: a man with a horse's ears and tail, a snub nose and a mane of hair. The goat features crept in later, borrowed from Pan, and by the Renaissance they had almost completely taken over.
Satyrs, also called sileni, were rowdy nature spirits who followed Dionysus, god of wine. They lived in woods, mountains and pastures and loved drinking, music and dancing. Hesiod's Catalogue of Women describes them as good-for-nothing pranksters, forever meddling with people and their belongings. Yet they were also thought to hold useful wisdom if they could be persuaded to share it: the elderly satyr Silenus served as tutor to the young Dionysus, and an Ionian story told of a captured silenos who gave sound advice.
Over time they softened. Greek art made them steadily more human, conflation with the goat-legged Pans added horns and hooves, and the Romans merged them with their own fauns until the two were indistinguishable. Since the early twentieth century they have lost most of their old crudeness and turn up in fantasy and children's books, usually under the name 'faun'.
In classical Athens they even had their own theatre genre. A satyr play always had a chorus of satyrs led by Silenus, set a mythological story in the distant past like a tragedy, and filled it with bawdy jokes. Demetrius of Phalerum called the form a 'playful tragedy', halfway between tragedy and comedy. Only Euripides' Cyclops survives complete, along with a large part of Sophocles' Searchers.
The name's origin is uncertain; one suggestion links it to a Greek word for wild animal. Classicist Martin Litchfield West argued that satyrs belong to a wider family of Indo-European nature spirits, often part horse or donkey, including the Kimnaras of the Ramayana and the hairy Slavic leshy said to lead travellers astray. The Hebrew Bible's goat-demons, which Jerome equated with satyrs, offer a Near Eastern parallel.
Source: Satyr
