(7. 79. 22ff.). They are half human, half animal beings who live in the
mountains and attend Kubera, the ruler of the north; their name might be
rendered as ‘Query-humans’.
In a Greek setting we immediately think of the goat-shanked god Pan,
whom we have already discussed, of the Satyrs and Sileni, and of the
Centaurs. Satyrs and Sileni, who are hard to distinguish from each other, live
in the wild and have the ears and tails (and sometimes legs) of horses. Sileni
make love to the Nymphs in caves, as does Hermes (Hymn. Aphr. 262 f.). In
theCatalogue of Women the birth of the mountain Nymphs occurs together
with that of the ‘good-for-nothing, prankster Satyrs’ and the ‘divine Kouretes,
dancers who love to sport’:
]οOρειαι Ν3μφαι θεα? $ξεγνοντο
κα? γνο ο1τιδαν;ν Σατ3ρων κα? qμηχανοργων
ΚουρHτ τε θεο? φιλοπαγμονε %ρχηστHρε. (‘Hes.’ fr. 10a. 17–19)The Satyrs evidently had a reputation for playing tricks on people and inter-
fering with their property; this is in accord with their character as portrayed
in the satyric drama of fifth-century Athens. The Centaurs of myth, four-
legged mountain-dwellers compounded from man and horse, are also liable
to be unruly, and in the poem Kaminos (Hom. Epigr. 14 =‘Hes.’ fr. 302) they
appear as potential wreckers of human constructions.^47
On the other hand some such creatures possess wisdom and knowledge
that is useful to mankind if they can be induced to impart it. Midas was said
to have captured a Silenus who gave him a philosophical insight (Aristotle
fr. 44, cf. Hdt. 8. 138). Virgil in his sixth Eclogue describes how two boys tied
Silenus up as he lay in a drunken slumber and made him sing a cosmogony.
The Centaur Chiron educated Achilles and several other heroes, and one of
the Hesiodic wisdom poems purported to convey his teachings. There is a
parallel story from the Tirol that can hardly be explained as an echo of
Classical learning. There people told of a Wild Man who lived in a cave and
who, once made drunk and so captured, taught woodcutters how to make
cheese.^48
A corrupt entry in Hesychius (σ 259) gives Sauadai (?) as the Macedonian
name for Sileni. Whatever the true reading, the inference is that silenus-like
figures existed also in Macedonian lore. Another entry (δ 713), unintelligible
(^47) They gave their names to the Kallikántzari of modern Greek folklore, who have a similar
destructive character, though in other respects they are more like the Satyrs or Sileni. See
Lawson (as n. 19), 190–235.
(^48) Mannhardt (1905), i. 112.
- Nymphs and Gnomes 293