The conception of the Sat, 7, « half-human half- bestial form, belongs origina ly to Asia Minor, and was developed, first in Ionian; and then in general Greek art. The more strictly Greek conceptions of Thessalian Centaur and Arcadian Pan are funda- mentally the same in character. The Satyr-type varies between human mixed with horse and human mixed with goat, while the Centaur is only of the first kind and Pan only of the second. Silenus is a similar idea, of Anatolian origin prob- ably, but developed in art more on the human side. The idea in all these figures is that of rude, free, natural life, untrained, unfettered by con- ventions and ideas of merely human origin ; this life of nature is the spontancous expression of the Divine life, and comes nearer to the Divine nature than men can approach, but also it has a distinct human side, and can come more easily into rela- tions with mankind than the Divine nature can. Men can by stealth catch and force to their will * the Satyr and Silenus, who are thus intermediaries between the Divine and the human. On the other hand, those figures are the companions and servants and associates of the god Dionysos, a deity of marked Anatolian character. In’ another respect they are a means of mediating between the Divine nature and mankind: ‘they took them wives of all that they chose’ (Gn 62). Now the idea lies deep in the Anatolian religion, as we shall see, that man has come from God and goes back to him at death; and evidently this relation between Satyrs or Sileni and human women is one of the grotesque developments by degradation of that idea ; see below on the serpent (11).
(2) The bu/? often appears in surroundings which show his religious significance: in one case he seems to be standing on an altar, as an object of worship to the human figures looking towards him.| The very frequent employment of a bull’s head on sepulchral and other steles and on gar- cophagi at a later period evidently originated in the sacred character of the animal, and had at first an apotropaic purpose (the Divine power protect- ing the grave), but became purely conventional and ornamental in the lapse of time. But even in the above-mentioned case, where the bull is the object of worship, a glance at the figure is sufficient to show that he is worshipped as a symbol: he represents and embodies the generative power of nature: there lies behind him the Divine power of growth and life, which he expresses: in this char- acter he played a part in the Phrygian Mysteries. t
(8) The goat, which is mentioned as sacred in the worship of Leto and Lairbenos, § and doubtless generally, was associated with Dionysos, a deity of markedly Anatolian character. At Laodicea on the Lycus the goat appears as a companion of the god Aseis (identified with the Greek Zeus, and treated as an epithet of Zeus), who lays his hands on the horns of a goat standing beside him. Tn Greek art there is known a type showing Aphrodite riding on a goat, which may probably be an artistic development of an old schema showing a deity
* Xenophon, Anab. i. 2, and many other places.
+ Perrot, P. 668 £.; cf. p. 672. . ;
t Tutpos dpdnovros xi xarip rebpov dpéxov, ‘the god-bull is father of the god-serpent, and the serpent of the bull,’ was a formula of the Phrygian Mysteries (Clemens Alex. Protrept. ii.).
§ See Roscher’s Lexikon der gr. wu. rém. Mythologie, s.v. ‘Lair-
benos’ (Drexler), and Ramsay, Cities and Bish. of Phrygia, i. i
p. 188f. See also below, (8).
RELIGION OF GREECE 115
standing on a goat. Such also is a late Anatolian type showing Men sitting or riding on a goat.
The goat and the ox are evidently the animals characteristic of a pastoral people on the great plains of central Asia Minor; and the fact that they were so useful must have helped to give them their sacred character. Countless herds of goats are still a feature of the great plains of the central plateau.
Like the bull, the sacred goat is doubtless to be understood as the male animal, the embodiment and representative of the productive Divine power regarded on the active side. The Divine nature, as we shall see, was regarded in Anatolia some- times as complete and sexless, but more frequently as divided into two Divine beings, male and female 3 and in the latter case the life of nature is pictured in the cultus as the mutual relations of the Divine pair, the god and the goddess.
(4) The sheep was a third animal of great im- portance on the pasture-land of the plateau; and there is evidence that it was sacred. The sheep was worshipped by the Samians, and was closely connected with the worship of Hermes. Milchhéfer in Archiolog. Zeitung, 1883, Pp. 263, quotes examples of the occurrence of the ram as a figure on graves in Phrygia and Armenia.
The sacred sheep is to be understood as the ram. He stands in the same relation to Hermes as the goat does to Dionysos. It is a ram that appears on the Anatolian and Armenian tombs.
(5) The horse must be regarded as a sacred animal (as might be expected), on account of the widely-spread representations of the Horseman- god. No Divine figure is so common in the later hieratic art of Asia Minor as this deity. He occurs on the coins of many cities in Lydia and West Phrygia, and on rock reliefs as well as on votive steles in the Pisidian hill-country ; these are almost all of the Roman period, but the type is certainly much older. In many cases the Horseman-god is a hero, i.e. the deified form of a dead man (regarded as identified with the god, § VIII (5)), and the type must in those cases be regarded as sepulchral. Hence the horse-head, which appears in many sepulchral reliefs in Attica, may be taken as a symbolic indication of the same type, the part standing for the whole. In those reliefs the deified dead is usually represented as a seated figure of heroic size, and the horse-head in an upper corner of the relief indicates in brief the type of the Horseman-god, which is another form of the dead man’s new heroized nature. The horse was pote imported into Anatolia, and belongs to a later period than bull, sheep, and goat.