Sileni

Also Known As: Greek Σειληνοί, Seilēnoi, also spelled Σιληνοί, Silēnoi; singular Silenus or Seilenos; the name was anciently derived from seiō, “to shake or move to and fro,” and lēnos, “the wine-trough,” though that etymology is a late guess
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: Wine-making, unflagging dance and song, and a braying uproar that once broke an enemy line.
Role in Mythos: They are the eldest generation of Dionysus’ rustic followers, fathers of the satyr tribes and the working hands of his vintage and his revel.
Relation to Humans: Mortals meet them at the edges of cultivation, in press-yards and on hillsides and on islands past the shipping lanes, and almost always as a crowd rather than as a visitor. Athenian craftsmen sold hollow Silenus figurines that split open to show a god inside, which turned the whole type into a byword for ugliness with something better hidden in it.

Grape must comes up over the ankle and stays there, cool and sticky, and the whole press-yard smells of split fruit turning in the sun. Six old men are working it. One hauls on the lever beam, two tread the pulp, one holds a skin under the spout with the concentration of a man who fully intends to drink from it, and the others have already started singing. They are heavy through the belly, white-haired, blunt-nosed. Behind each of them a horse’s tail hangs to the back of the knee.

An Athenian painter put that scene on a black-figure amphora in the sixth century BC, and it is about as close to a working portrait of the Sileni as the record allows.

The Greeks themselves were not entirely certain what the creatures were. Pausanias, travelling in the second century AD and asking anyone who would give him an answer, came back with one clean sentence: the oldest of the satyrs are called Sileni. That is the definition the sources broadly agree on. Not a separate species, but a later stage of the same one. The satyrs are the young, lean and shameless and permanently in trouble. A Silenus is what a satyr becomes if it lives long enough, and what it becomes is fatter, hairier, slower, and considerably better at making wine.

The grammar has caused trouble ever since. Somewhere inside the tribe there is also *the* Silenus, one particular old drunk who tutored Dionysus and had to be propped up on a donkey, and the definite article did its usual damage. In the earliest material the word is a plural before it is a name. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite has the Sileni and keen-eyed Hermes lying with the deep-breasted mountain nymphs in the recesses of pleasant caves, which is where the satyrs are presumably being made. Strabo files Silenoi in a list of the god’s ministers beside Satyrs, Bacchae, Lenae and Tityri, a category rather than a person. Only in the late epic of Nonnus does the family tree get tidied: an earthborn Silenus fathers three sons named Maron, Leneus and Astraeus, and from those three the twiform generation of satyrs descends. By then the Sileni are old enough to need vine-branches to lean on while they walk uphill.

Their anatomy is horse rather than goat, and this is the detail most modern retellings get backwards. The ears are equine, tapering and set high. The tail is a real tail, long and coarse-haired, not a tuft. The rest is an unflattering study of an aging human body: sagging chest, hard round gut, bald dome fringed with white, a nose pushed flat against the face. Some vases wrap them in a fleece of thick white hair from throat to shin. Nonnus, writing five centuries later and in a considerably louder register, gives them the horns of oxen and has enemy commanders promise to cut the horned heads off and hang them from their horses’ necks. Aelian records that they wore cloaks with the wool left on both sides, which sounds less like costume than like what an old man wears when the hillside gets cold.

What they mostly do is attend. Where Dionysus goes, they go, and the going is loud. Philostratus describes the god mooring at Andros with a mixed throng of satyrs and Lenae and all the Sileni aboard, on an island where the earth has burst open and is running wine. In the war against the Indians they turn up as an actual regiment, rowing across the Hydaspes with hands and feet, riding lions and bridling them by the mane, one of them straddling a bull and squeezing out a tune on paired pipes. They fight badly and enthusiastically. When Dionysus loses his mind and abandons the army, the change in them is measured by a small and rather sad detail: the Sileni went into battle sober and silent, with their faces unpainted.

Their finest hour is an accident. Eratosthenes preserved the story, and Hyginus repeated it: when Zeus called every god to fight the Giants, Dionysus and Hephaestus and the satyrs and the Sileni arrived riding donkeys. The donkeys got close enough to the enemy to panic, and let out a braying such as the Giants had never heard in their lives. The Giants ran. An army of drunks won a battle by frightening their own transport.

The Sileni also left a mark on Athenian shop shelves. Craftsmen sold hollow figurines of the type, ugly little pipe-playing old men that could be pulled apart at the waist to reveal small images of gods inside. Alcibiades uses them in Plato’s Symposium to describe Socrates, all snub nose and shabbiness on the outside and something divine sealed within. That simile had a long afterlife, and it is worth being exact about whose it is: the reading of the Silenus as a figure of hidden inner worth is a philosophical conceit, not a piece of Greek folk belief, and it became a European commonplace only because Erasmus of Rotterdam expanded it into a full essay, the *Sileni Alcibiadis*, in his *Adages* of 1515.

Their powers are modest and entirely in character. They know wine, from the vine to the trough to the jar, and the vintage in Dionysus’ service appears to be genuinely their work rather than a joke about drinking. They have stamina no mortal reveller could match, they play the double pipes, they can carry a nymph off at a run, and collectively they can make enough noise to rout something enormous. Nothing in the record credits the tribe with real prophecy. The dark oracle about how it is best for man never to be born belongs to the individual Silenus, cornered and squeezed for it by King Midas, and it did not come freely.

The limits are just as plain. They are old, and the sources will not let anyone forget it, propping them on staffs and fennel stalks and making them the last to cross a river. They are drunk, which is the point of them and also the reason they lose things. And they die. Pausanias thought this the surest evidence of what the Sileni actually were, and his argument is a good one: you may infer that they are a mortal race from their graves, for there is a tomb of a Silenus in the land of the Hebrews and another of a Silenus in Asia Minor. Almost nothing else in Greek myth has a burial address.

Pausanias also passed on the strangest thing anyone ever claimed about them. A Carian sailor named Euphemus told him that a voyage to Italy had been blown off course into the outer sea, past any water seamen knew, and that among the empty islands there were some with people on them. The crew had put in at such a place before and had no wish to repeat it. The sailors called the islands the Satyrides. The inhabitants were red-haired, and on their flanks they carried tails not much smaller than a horse’s.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Sileni in Greek mythology?

The Sileni are the elder satyrs of Greek myth, rustic spirits in the following of Dionysus. Pausanias records the definition plainly: the oldest of the satyrs are called Sileni. They appear as a tribe or a generation rather than as individuals, and they are credited with making the god’s wine as well as attending his revels.

What is the difference between a Silenus and a satyr?

Age and anatomy. Sileni are the aged form of the satyr, fat and white-haired and balding where the younger satyrs are lean, and they are drawn with the ears and tail of a horse rather than the goat features that later art and modern retellings favour. The word is also used for one specific old companion of Dionysus, which is why the plural and the personal name are so often confused.

What did the Sileni look like?

They were shown as heavy, elderly men with bald crowns, snub noses, shaggy white body hair, high equine ears and long horse tails. Later poetry, particularly Nonnus, also gives them the horns of oxen. Aelian adds that they wore cloaks with the wool left on both sides.

Did the Sileni ever fight in a battle?

Yes, and they won one by accident. Eratosthenes and Hyginus preserve the story that Dionysus, Hephaestus, the satyrs and the Sileni rode donkeys into the war against the Giants, and that the donkeys panicked and brayed so loudly that the Giants fled. The Sileni also serve as a regiment in Nonnus’ account of Dionysus’ Indian campaign.

Were the Sileni immortal?

No. Pausanias argued that the Sileni were a mortal race precisely because their graves were known, naming a tomb of a Silenus in the land of the Hebrews and another in Asia Minor. That mortality separates them from the Olympian gods they travel with.