Perry, Walter Copland: Greek and Roman sculpture: a popular introduction to the history of Greek and Roman sculpture (London, 1882)

THE SATYR.

437

cion— called Tripodes,irovs\ the number of tripods set up in it—there was
a statue of a Satyr, of which Praxiteles was said to be not a little proud.
When Phryne asked him which was the most beautiful of his works
he allowed her to choose one of them as a gift, but would not tell her
which of them seemed to him the best. Phryne therefore ordered her
servant to go hastily to Praxiteles and inform him that the greater
number of his statues had been destroyed by fire, but not all. On
hearing this Praxiteles rushed out of the house, crying out that all his
labour had been lost if the flames had seized his Satyr and his Eros.
Phryne then wisely chose the Eros, and dedicated it in the Temple at
Thespiae.'

The transforming grace-giving power of art has seldom been more
strikingly manifested than in the evolution of the Satyr of Praxiteles
— of which the statue in the Capitol gives us an idea—from the semi-
bestial ' idle and worthless'2 race who followed Dionysus in drunken
revelry. In their original form the Satyrs were ignoble both in form
and feature ; their limbs, though strong, were without fair proportions,
and either disfigured by coarse sinews or by the soft spongy flesh of
the habitual drunkard ; their legs were covered with hair and they were
goat-footed ; their heads were partly bald, their ears were pointed, and
hard knots protruded from their neck ; while a tail of bristling hair
disgraced their backs. Their faces were rendered preternatural!)-
ugly by low, mean foreheads, snub noses, and a lascivious leer; so that
we are surprised and angry that they seem to find favour with the
sprightly and charming nymphs. They are, however, favourite sub-
jects of art, and seem chosen by the Greeks to express the less noble
feelings, and the coarser, w ilder passions of our human nature, w hich,
while they could not altogether ignore, they shrank from incor-
porating in an entirely human form.3

In the Satyr of Praxiteles all that is coarse and ugly in form, all
that is mean or revolting in expression, is purged away by the fire

1 Athen. xiii. p. KOf. fij*S.tJ* **» P*P«» sound

s n...:...i .« , lliai a I the woods with wartled echo ring.

■ Uciiod, Ftvguu 13. 2.

3 The merry train of Dionysu.1
JrSCTlbcd in Spenser's I airy Qucat