To these Satrai-Satyroi we must now return. It is now sufficiently clear that, whatever they became to a later imagination, to Homer and Pindar and the vase-painters these horse-men, these attendants of Dionysos, were not fairies, not ‘spirits of vegetation,’ though from such they may have borrowed many traits, but the representatives of an actual primitive population. They owe their monstrous form, their tails, their horses’ ears and hoofs, not to any desire to express ‘powers of fertilization’ but to the malign imagination of their conquerors. They are not incarnations of a horse-god Dionysos[985]—such a being never existed—they are simply Satrai. It is not of course denied that they ultimately _became_ mythological, that is indeed indicated by the gradual change of form. As a rule the Greek imagination tends to anthropomorphism, but here we have a reverse case. By lapse of time and gradual oblivion of the historical facts of conquest, what was originally a primitive man developes in the case of the Centaurs into a mythological horse-demon. * * * * * The Satyrs undergo no such change, they remain substantially human. The element of horse varies but is never predominant. The form in which there is most horse is well shown in fig. 123. This picture is from the reverse of the cylix in the Würzburg Museum[986], on which is depicted the feast of Phineus already discussed (p. 225). The fact is worth noting that both representations come from a Thracian cycle of mythology. Phineus is a Thracian hero, Dionysos a Thracian god. Dionysos stands in a chariot to which are yoked a lion and a stag. By his side is a woman, probably a goddess, but whether Ariadne or Semele cannot certainly be determined, nor for the present argument does it matter. The god has stopped to water his steeds at a fountain. Satyrs attend him, one is drawing water from the well basin, another clambers on the lion’s back. Some maidens have bathed at the fountain, and are resting under a palm tree, one is just struggling back into her clothes. Two prying Satyrs look on with evil in their hearts. They are wild men with shaggy bodies, rough hair, horses’ ears and tails, and they have the somewhat exceptional addition of hoofs; the human part of them is closely analogous to the shaggy Centaurs of fig. 122. [Illustration: FIG. 123.]