Satyr standing

Satyrs were the wild attendants of Dionysus, half-man, half-goat creatures of the Greek countryside — drinkers, dancers, chasers of nymphs, makers of music on the pan-pipes. In the sculptural tradition they came to embody a particular ideal of physical ease that the more decorous Olympians could not show. The "Resting Satyr" type of Praxiteles, surviving in dozens of Roman copies, was the canonical statue of this figure — slim, leaning, half-smiling, completely at home in his own body.