Silenus with a Wineskin

Athenian theatre-goers knew Silenus well. At the festival of Dionysus the tragedies were followed by satyr plays, boisterous pieces with a chorus of satyrs, and Silenus usually appeared as their old father. In the Cyclops of Euripides, the only satyr play to survive complete, he is the slave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, and when Odysseus lands he trades away his master's cheese and lambs for wine, which he then drinks.

The museum dates the Greek original of this statue to around 340 to 320 BC, and the marble is a Roman copy. The bearded old man wears a wreath of ivy, the plant of Dionysus, and leans on a tree trunk with his cloak and a wineskin hanging over it.

Some of what you see is later work. The bowl in his left hand and the forearm that holds it were added by a restorer, as were most of the ivy leaves and the front of his right foot. The statue came to Munich in 1814, bought straight from the Palazzo Barberini in Rome.