Cook, Arthur B.: Zeus: a study in ancient religion (Band 1): Zeus god of the bright sky (Cambridge, 1914)

696

Goat instead of Bull

to reject. ' The Satyr-play,' he says1, * coming at the end of
the tetralogy, represented the joyous arrival of the Reliving
Dionysus and his rout of attendant daimones at the end of the
Sacer Ludus.'

The question of the Satyr-play is so bound up with that of
the Satyrs themselves that one is practically forced to begin by
asking—Who were the Satyrs ? Were they the horse-like or the
goat-like creatures of the Attic vase-painters ? After a full and,
I hope, impartial survey of the facts2 I am of opinion that by
rights the horse-creatures were Silenoi and the goat-creatures
Sdtyroi, but that as early as the middle of the fifth century, and
perhaps earlier, the goat-type proper to the Sdtyroi had been, at
least for dramatic purposes, more or less contaminated with the
horse-type proper to the Silenoi*.

On the krater of Klitias and Ergotimos (e. 600—550 B.C.) three
ithyphallic creatures with equine legs, tails, and ears are inscribed
Silenoi On a kylix signed by the same Ergotimos, now at
Berlin, an ithyphallic being with human legs and feet, but equine
tail and ear, is again inscribed Silends*. On a fragmentary black-
figured kylix from the Persic debris at Athens are the remains of
a shaggy personage inscribed Silends, but whether he is equine
or otherwise does not appear6. Red-figured vases tell the same
story. A kylix at Munich shows an ithyphallic figure with equine
tail named Silends'1. A gilded aryballos at Berlin calls another

1 G. Murray in Harrison Themis p. 343.

2 For a fair summary of the evidence, both literary and monumental, see E. Kuhnert's
article in Roscher Lex. Myth. iv. 444—53 r. The learned author reaches, as I hold, the
wrong conclusion, but he is scrupulously just to his opponents.

3 S. Reinach in an able essay on ' Marsyas' in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions Paris
1912 iv. 29—44 argues that the Silenoi were originally asses, and that their type became
equine in Greece through confusion with that of the Centaurs. Miss Harrison, who first
drew my attention to Reinach's view, adds (May 22, 1913) : 'I suspect that the mules
and asses turned into horses in horse-bearing Thessaly.'

Reinach may well be right in supposing that the Silenoi were asinine before they
became equine. But on the Attic vases, with which we are here concerned, the
transformation was already complete : the Silenoi are regularly depicted with the traits,
not of asses, nor even of mules, but of horses pure and simple.

4 Furtwangler—Reichhold Gr. Vasenmalerei \. 58 pi. 11—12.

5 Gerhard Auserl. Vasenb. iii. 160 ff. pi. 238, -Reinach Rip. Vases ii. 120, 3—6,
Wien. Vorlegebl. 1888 pi. 2.

6 P. Kretschmer Die Griechischen Vaseninschriften Gtitersloh 1894 p. 233, C. Frankel
Satyr- undBakchennamen anf Vasenbildern Halle a. S. 1912 pp. 20, 84 f.

7 Jahn Vasensamml. Milnchenp. g>jf. no. 331 ($| UANO$TEt>PON), Kretschmer
op. cit. p. 132 ($lUENO$), W. Klein Die griechischen Vasen mit Lieblingsinschriften^

Leipzig 1898 P. 65 (^ILENO* TEUTON).