Satyrs

Satyrs are nature spirits in the retinue of Dionysus: human above, goat below, with a horse's tail in earlier art and full goat legs later. They are not gods, they do not die exactly, and they exist to demonstrate the parts of life that civic Greek culture had no room for — drinking, music, dancing, and desire without much filtering.

Their instrument is the pan-pipe or the aulos, and both come with a story about the danger of playing too well. Pan, the goat-god closest to them in nature, challenged Apollo to a music contest and lost; Marsyas the satyr did the same and was flayed for it. The lesson attached to satyr music is consistently that the Olympians do not take competition well.

The oldest of them is Silenus, tutor to Dionysus himself, usually drunk and usually carried. When Midas treated him kindly, Dionysus granted the wish that ruined him — so a satyr is the direct cause of the golden touch.

Greek theatre owes them a genre. Tragedy competitions ended with a satyr play, a short obscene comedy performed by a chorus dressed as satyrs, which sent the audience home laughing after three tragedies. Only one survives complete, Euripides' Cyclops.

Panic is theirs too. The sudden groundless terror that seizes a crowd or a flock was attributed to Pan, and keeps his name in English — the one myth-word most people use daily without knowing whose it is.