Silenus

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Silenus is the oldest and wisest of the satyrs in Greek myth: a fat, bald, snub-nosed old man, perpetually drunk and usually carried by a donkey because he can no longer keep his feet. He belongs to the train of Dionysus, whom the stories make him foster-father, tutor, and constant companion — the shambling elder among the god’s wild retinue of satyrs and maenads. In the plural the Greeks spoke of sileni — sometimes silenoi — a class of such creatures, the elder kin of the goat-legged satyrs and barely distinguished from them; but one Silenus stands out as a named individual, half buffoon and half sage. The class and the figure share a name and a face, and ancient authors slide between them freely, yet the named Silenus has a biography the nameless sileni do not: he reared a god, he was caught by a king, and he is made, more than once, to say what the rest of the company would rather not hear.

Peter Paul Rubens, “The Drunken Silenus” (c. 1616–17), Alte Pinakothek, Munich — Web Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The two halves are the point. The drunkenness and the comedy are inseparable from a reputation for hidden knowledge, and the myths return again and again to the moment the foolish exterior is made to give up something true. Silenus is a prophet who must be ambushed. He does not volunteer his wisdom; it has to be cornered out of him, usually after his captors have used against him the very wine that is his element. The image is exact and recurrent: the god of the vine has a foster-father whom the vine itself betrays, and the truth he carries comes out only when he is too far gone to keep it in.

The tutor of the wine-god

Before he is a prophet he is a nurse. The named Silenus belongs to the infancy of Dionysus: when the twice-born god is given over to be reared in secret, it is Silenus, with the nymphs of Nysa, who fosters him, and the relation never lapses into the past tense. Grown, the god keeps his old foster-father at his side, and Silenus becomes the fixed comic anchor of the thiasos, the reeling Bacchic procession — the one figure too old and too drunk to dance, propped on his donkey or held upright by satyrs, while the maenads rave around him. Greek art settled his appearance early and kept it: the bald dome, the pug nose, the swollen belly, the wine-skin, the snub satyr-ears, the unsteady mount. On vases he is the elder of the troop; in the satyr-play, the broad farce that followed the tragic trilogy, he is the leader of the satyr-chorus, the master of revels whose business is to undercut every solemnity the tragedies had just raised. The figure was built, from the start, for laughter — which is precisely what makes the wisdom land.

Drunken Silenus carried on a donkey, Roman mosaic from the House of Paquius Proculus, Pompeii, now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

His drunkenness is not incidental but constitutive. It is the source of his helplessness, the lure by which he is repeatedly trapped, and the loosener of his tongue all at once. The Greeks had a settled intuition that wine and prophecy lie close together — that the god who unstrings the senses also unstrings the guard on hidden things — and Silenus is that intuition given a body. He cannot stand, and he cannot lie; the same wine does both. He is, in this, the comic double of the sober oracle: where the Pythia is solemn, veiled, and sought out, Silenus is ridiculous, exposed, and ambushed, and yet the two deliver from the same source. The buffoon and the sage are not two characters awkwardly joined but one figure seen from two sides of the wine.

The capture of Silenus

The best-known instance is the legend of King Midas, the Phrygian king who captured Silenus by lacing a spring with wine and pressed him for the secret of what is best for mortals. The motif of the captured wisdom-figure is old — a wild thing snared and made to answer is a pattern the Greeks knew well — but in the Midas version it acquires its grim particular content. In Ovid’s telling (Metamorphoses 11), the order of events is gentler and more human: the old satyr, separated from the Bacchic procession and stupefied with wine and age, is found by Phrygian countrymen, bound in his own garlands, and brought to the king, who recognizes a former companion of the rites and keeps ten days of feasting before returning him to Dionysus — for which the god grants Midas the disastrous wish that turns all he touches to gold. Virgil’s sixth Eclogue preserves a different and older flavor of the same scene: two herdsmen and a naiad find Silenus sleeping off his drink in a cave, tie him with his own wreaths, and demand the song he is always promising — whereupon the captured satyr sings the making of the world, the first things, the formation of land and sea and living kinds. The two captures frame the figure exactly. In Ovid he is a befuddled guest who brings a curse in his wake; in Virgil he is a cosmogonist who, pinned down, sings the universe into order. Drunk, snared, and reluctant, Silenus is the mouth through which large truths arrive.

Nicolas Poussin, “Midas and Bacchus” (c. 1624–29), Alte Pinakothek, Munich; the elderly Silenus reclines at left — Web Gallery of Art, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The wisdom of Silenus

The answer he gives Midas is the darkest of these truths, and it is reported not in Ovid or Virgil but by later authors who treat it as a saying — the wisdom of Silenus. The fullest source is Plutarch, who in the Consolatio ad Apollonium attributes the exchange to Aristotle’s lost dialogue Eudemus, or On the Soul: pressed by Midas to say what is the best and most desirable thing of all for human beings, the cornered satyr is at first silent, and then breaks out with the verdict that the best of all is utterly beyond reach — never to have been born, never to be, to be nothing — and that the next best, once born, is to die as quickly as possible. The drunk in the story knows what no one wants to hear.

The saying did not begin with Silenus, and the ancients knew it. Its content is a fixed point of archaic Greek thought, older than the satyr who voices it. Theognis of Megara had set it in elegiac verse generations before — that best of all for mortals is never to be born nor to look upon the sun’s sharp light, and, being born, to pass the gates of Hades with all speed. Sophocles gives the chorus of the Oedipus at Colonus the same judgment near the play’s close: not to be born is, beyond all reckoning, best; and the next best, once one has appeared, is to go back quickly to where one came from. To put this verdict in the mouth of the drunken foster-father of the wine-god is therefore not to invent a doctrine but to assign an old and respectable Greek pessimism to the one speaker who could deliver it without being believed responsible for it — a satyr, a creature outside the human compact, who has nothing to gain by flattering mortals about their lot. The wisdom of Silenus is the formula in its starkest shape: existence is the worse bargain, and the wise thing would have been to decline it.

There is a fitness in the verdict’s sitting where it does, at the center of the wine-god’s company rather than in some austere school. The festival of Dionysus is the institution that confronts this knowledge and survives it: the drink that fells Silenus is the same drink that the god gives mortals as release, and the tragedies played at his festival stage exactly the unbearable truths the wisdom of Silenus names — the house destroyed, the child killed, the hero broken — and send the audience home not crushed but somehow steadied. The satyr’s answer is the floor the whole edifice is built over. To know that not being born is best, and to drink and dance and watch the plays anyway, is not a contradiction the Greeks failed to notice; it is the arrangement, the pessimism absorbed and outlasted rather than refuted. Silenus says the worst thing in the most ridiculous voice, and the celebration goes on around him.

That assignment had a long afterlife. The young Friedrich Nietzsche made the wisdom of Silenus the keystone of The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where the satyr’s answer to Midas stands for the abyss the Greeks looked into and out of which their art was born — Apollonian beauty as the shimmering veil thrown over a Dionysian knowledge that life is not worth wanting. Nietzsche’s reading is a nineteenth-century one, owing as much to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the will as to any ancient text, and it should be taken as reception rather than as the meaning the Greeks themselves drew; but it fixed Silenus permanently in modern thought as the spokesman of tragic pessimism, the one who says the unsayable thing the festival exists to survive.

Socrates as Silenus

The other great fixing of the figure runs the opposite way — not down into the abyss but inward toward a hidden good. In Plato’s Symposium, the drunken Alcibiades bursts in late and, asked to praise love, praises instead the man beside him, and does it through Silenus. He compares Socrates to the carved figures of Silenus that craftsmen sold in the statuaries’ shops — figures made to open down the middle, so that the grotesque satyr-shell, when pulled apart, was found to hold images of gods inside (Symposium 215a–b). In the hosted translation, Alcibiades says Socrates “is exactly like the busts of Silenus, which are set up in the statuaries, shops, holding pipes and flutes in their mouths; and they are made to open in the middle, and have images of gods inside them.” Socrates, he insists, is exactly such a thing: ugly, snub-nosed, mocking, forever playing the fool and professing to know nothing; and when he is opened, what temperance and what divine and golden images are found within. The whole of Alcibiades’ speech turns on that gap — between a face that invites contempt and a worth that, once seen, makes the seer ashamed of his own life.

It is the only place in the dialogue where the praise of eros — the ascent toward the beautiful that Socrates himself had described moments earlier in the words of Diotima — collapses back into a single bewildered man’s love for an actual person who will not have him. Alcibiades has opened the Silenus and seen the gold, and it has ruined him for everything cheaper; he cannot possess what he has seen, and cannot forget it. The comparison fixed Silenus in the European imagination not merely as a mythological grotesque but as a figure for the gap between appearance and worth — the truth, and the good, that wear a ridiculous face.

The Silenus of Alcibiades

Engraved title page of Jacob Cats, “Silenus Alcibiades, sive Proteus” (1618), an emblem book built on the Silenus-of-Alcibiades figure — Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Later readers leaned hard on that reading. The carved Silenus-box of the Symposium became, in the Renaissance, a portable emblem with a name of its own. Erasmus made the Sileni Alcibiadis one of the long essay-adages of his expanding Adagia, given its fullest form in the Froben edition of 1515, and turned the toy into a hermeneutic principle: the most precious things wear the plainest, even the most repellent, husks, and the world routinely mistakes the shell for the substance. He runs the figure through a roll of unlikely Sileni — the homely Socrates, the beggar-philosophers, the rough prophets, John the Baptist in his camel-hair, and at the height of the argument Christ himself, the lowliest in appearance and the most divine within — and turns the device back on a Church that had, in his account, inverted the Silenus, growing gorgeous outside and hollow at the core. Through Erasmus the “Silenus of Alcibiades” became a commonplace of humanist and reforming writing for sacred or valuable meaning concealed under a plain or distasteful surface, and the image recurs wherever a tradition wants to say that the precious thing hides itself.

Rabelais seized the same figure at the opening of Gargantua (1534): the reader is told to take the book as a Silenus-box, a coarse and laughable outside that splits to disclose a marrow worth the cracking, and to break the bone for the substance within. The emblem suited an age learning to read allegorically and to defend obscurity — the apparently low or absurd surface became a credential, a sign that something had been hidden there on purpose for the worthy reader to find. In that move the satyr stops being a character in a myth at all and becomes a theory of reading: meaning is wrapped, the wrapping is meant to be unattractive, and interpretation is the act of prising it open. The line runs cleanly back to Alcibiades prising open his Socrates, and forward into every later defense of a difficult or unlovely text that conceals a treasure. The pull toward such a figure — the ugly outside, the holy inside — is easy to feel and worth noting; it is also a reading the texts invite rather than a single doctrine they teach.

The textual record

What the figure rests on is a scatter of passages rather than a single myth. The captured prophet who sings the cosmos is Virgil’s (Eclogue 6, hosted in John Dryden’s verse translation); the guest who brings Midas to ruin is Ovid’s (Metamorphoses 11, in the Brookes More translation). The verdict to Midas is preserved by Plutarch in the Consolatio ad Apollonium, which routes it through Aristotle’s lost Eudemus and sets it beside the older pessimism of Theognis and Sophocles; the relevant section is available in the Loeb-era English text on Perseus. The Silenus-figurines belong to Plato’s Symposium, in the speech of Alcibiades — read in Benjamin Jowett’s 1892 translation hosted here — and their long second life to Erasmus’s Adagia. A clear-eyed modern survey of the satyr-train and the named Silenus among them is Robin Hard’s revision of The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (2004). What the sources actually preserve, gathered up, is narrower and stranger than the emblem the Renaissance made of it: a drunk old satyr whom gods and kings keep cornering for an answer, and who, cornered, tells the truth.

→ In the library: Plato — Symposium (Jowett, 1892)

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