In Greek mythology, Silenus (Greek Σειληνός) was a companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus.
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Evolution of the character [link]
The original Silenus resembled a folklore man of the forest with the ears of a horse and sometimes also the tail and legs of a horse.[1] The later Sileni were drunken followers of Dionysus, usually bald and fat with thick lips and squat noses, and having the legs of a human. Later still, the plural "Sileni" went out of use and the only references were to one individual named Silenus, the teacher and faithful companion of the wine-god Dionysus.[2]
A notorious consumer of wine, he was usually drunk and had to be supported by satyrs or carried by a donkey. Silenus was described as the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Dionysus, and was said in Orphic hymns to be the young god's tutor. This puts him in a company of phallic or half-animal tutors of the gods, a group that includes Priapus, Hermaphroditus, Cedalion and Chiron, but also includes Pallas, the tutor of Athena.[3]
When intoxicated, Silenus was said to possess special knowledge and the power of prophecy. The Phrygian King Midas was eager to learn from Silenus and caught the old man by lacing a fountain from which Silenus often drank. As Silenus fell asleep, the king's servants seized and took him to their master.
Silenus shared with the king a pessimistic philosophy: That the best thing for a man is not to be born, and if already born, to die as soon as possible.[4]
An alternative story was that when lost and wandering in Phrygia, Silenus was rescued by peasants and taken to King Midas, who treated him kindly. In return for Midas' hospitality Silenus told him some tales and Midas, enchanted by Silenus’s fictions, entertained him for five days and nights.[5] Dionysus offered Midas a reward for his kindness towards Silenus, and Midas chose the power of turning everything he touched into gold. Another story was that Silenus had been captured by two shepherds, and regaled them with wondrous tales.
In Euripides's satyr play Cyclops, Silenus is stranded with the Satyrs in Sicily, where they have been enslaved by the Cyclops. They are the comic elements of the story, which is basically a play on Homer's Odyssey IX. Silenus refers to the satyrs as his children during the play. Silenus also appears in Emperor Julian the Apostate's satire, The Caesars, where he sits next to the gods and offers up his comments on the various rulers under examination. He essentially serves as Julian's voice of critique for Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius (whom he reveres as a fellow philosopher-king), and Constantine I.[6]
Silenus was also possibly a Latin term of abuse around 211 BC, being used in Plautus' Rudens to describe Labrax, a treacherous pimp or leno, as "...a pot-bellied old Silenus, bald head, beefy, bushy eyebrows, scowling, twister, god-forsaken criminal".[7]
In art [link]
Silenus commonly figures in Roman bas-reliefs of the train of Dionysus, a subject for sarcophagi, embodying the transcendent promises of Dionysian cult. The figure reappears with the Renaissance: a court dwarf posed for the Silenus-like figure astride a tortoise at the entrance to the Boboli Gardens, Florence. The Drunken Silenus, Peter Paul Rubens, painted in 1616-17 is conserved in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
In later literature and art [link]
Carl Linnaeus used the feminine form Silene as the name of a genus of flowering plant.[8]
Silenus appears in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, who endorsed his most famous dictum that "the best thing for a man is not to be born". Via Schopenhauer, Nietzsche discusses the "wisdom of Silenus" in The Birth of Tragedy.
During late 19th century Germany and Vienna, symbolism from ancient Greece was reinterpreted through a new Freudian prism. Around the same time Vienna Secession artist Gustav Klimt uses the irreverent, chubby-faced Silenus as a motif in several works to represent "buried instinctual forces".[9]
In 1884 Thomas Woolner published a long narrative poem about Silenus. In Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry Wooton turns praise of folly into a philosophy which mocks "slow Silenus" for being sober.
In Brian Hooker's 1923 English translation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano disparagingly refers to the ham actor Montfleury as "That Silenus who cannot hold his belly in his arms."
Silenus is a character, along with Bacchus, in the C.S. Lewis fantasy novel Prince Caspian, the second book (or fourth, depending on the order they are arranged) in The Chronicles of Narnia series.
In the Percy Jackson series written by Rick Riordan, Silenus is a satyr who dies during the battle against Cronus.
Martin Silenus is the satyr-like and alcohol-appreciating poet-pilgrim in American writer Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos.
Silenus appears as an amorous satyr in the children's story "Odysseus in the Serpent Maze," by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris.
Professor Silenus is a Character from Evelyn Waugh's first novel, Decline and Fall. He features as the disaffected architect of King's Thursday and provides the Novel with one of its primary motifs. In the prophetic style of the traditional Greek Silenus he informs the protagonist that life is, "a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It's great fun . . . Of course at the very centre there's a point completely at rest, if one could only find it. . . . Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again. . . . But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all. . . . People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone . . ."[10]
Footnotes [link]
- ^ The Oxford Classical Dictionary
- ^ Kerenyi, p. 177.
- ^ Kerenyi, p. 177.
- ^ Plutarch (1878 translation). "Consolation to Apollonius". The Morals, vol. 1. Online Library of Liberty. https://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1211&chapter=91420&layout=html&Itemid=27. Retrieved October 6, 2009. (See section 27.)
- ^ Thompson, J. 'Emotional Intelligence/Imaginal Intelligence' in Mythopoetry Scolar Journal, Vol 1, 2010
- ^ The Caesars on-line English translation.
- ^ Plautus
- ^ Umberto Quattrocchi, CRC World Dictionary of Plant Names, 1999, ISBN 0-8493-2678-8, 4:2482
- ^ Carl Schorske Fin-de-Siècle Vienna - Politics and Culture, 1980, page 221
- ^ Through Comedy toward Catholicism: A Reading of Evelyn Waugh's Early Novels, Michael Gorra, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Summer, 1988), pp. 201-220 https://www.jstor.org/pss/1208437
References [link]
- March, J., Cassell's Dictionary Of Classical Mythology, London, 1999. ISBN 0-304-35161-X
- Plautus, The Rope and other plays, London: Penguin Classics ISBN 0-14-044136-0
- Julian, The Caesars, Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library.
- Riordan, Rick "Percy Jackson and the Olympians Series"
- McSkimming, Geoffrey "Cairo Jim and the Sumptuous Stash of Silenus" [Bolinda Audio Books]. ISBN 978-1-74093-833-4
Further reading [link]
- Guy Michael Hedreen, 1992. Silens in Attic Black-figure Vase-painting: Myth and Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan) Catalogue of the corpus.
- Karl Kerenyi. The Gods of the Greeks, 1951.
- Over 300 images of Silenus at the Warburg Institute's Iconographic Database
Media related to Silenus at Wikimedia Commons
Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Silenus". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
https://wn.com/Silenus
Lion-tailed macaque
The lion-tailed macaque (Macaca silenus), or the wanderoo, is an Old World monkey endemic to the Western Ghats of South India.
Physical characteristics
The hair of the lion-tailed macaque is black. Its outstanding characteristic is the silver-white mane which surrounds the head from the cheeks down to its chin, which gives this monkey its German name Bartaffe - "beard ape". The hairless face is black in colour. With a head-body length of 42 to 61 cm and a weight of 2 to 10 kg, it ranks among the smaller macaques. The tail is medium in length, about 25 cm, and has a black tuft at the end, similar to a lion's tail. The male's tail-tuft is more developed than that of the female.
Gestation is approximately six months. The young are nursed for one year. Sexual maturity is reached at four years for females, and six years for males. The life expectancy in the wild is approximately 20 years, while in captivity is up to 30 years.
Behaviour
The lion-tailed macaque is a diurnal rainforest dweller. It is a good climber and spends a majority of its life in the upper canopy of tropical moist evergreen forests. Unlike other macaques, it avoids humans. In group behavior, it is much like other macaques; it lives in hierarchical groups of usually 10 to 20 animals, which consist of few males and many females. It is a territorial animal, defending its area first with loud cries towards the invading troops. If this proves to be fruitless, it brawls aggressively.
