Satyrs- Greek RaceRace"Companions of Dionysus"

In the Thiasos

On archaic vases they appear as men with horse tails and pointed ears, naked and running. They followed Dionysus everywhere, through the hills and into every field where his vine had taken root. They drank his wine until they fell and woke to do it again. Silenus, the oldest among them and Dionysus's foster father, rode an ass when he was too drunk to walk.

On the Stage

At the City Dionysia in Athens, a satyr play followed every tragic trilogy. The chorus wore horse-tailed costumes and played the Satyrs, led by their father Silenus. In Euripides's Cyclops, the only satyr play to survive complete, Polyphemus has enslaved a band of Satyrs on Sicily. Odysseus arrives, blinds the Cyclops with a burning stake, and frees them. Sophocles's Ichneutae survives only in fragments. In it, the Satyrs track stolen cattle for Apollo and stumble upon the infant Hermes, who has just invented the lyre from a tortoise shell.

Marsyas

Marsyas was a Satyr who played the aulos, the double-piped reed instrument. He challenged Apollo to a musical contest: his reeds against Apollo's lyre. The Muses judged. Apollo won and exercised the winner's right. He bound Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. In Ovid, the other Satyrs and woodland spirits wept, and their tears formed the river Marsyas in Phrygia.