The satyr was a degraded, or rather unhumanised Pan, more sensual and malicious in character, coarser in feature, and more bestial in form. Hesiod calls the satyrs “a useless and crafty tribe.” They were originally wood-demons, and men represented as satyrs took part in the festivals of Dionysus, the chief of vegetation spirits. Silenus, like Pan, the individualised head of a class, was also closely associated with Dionysus. The sileni, in fact, were but Phrygian variants of the satyrs, and are represented in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite as consorting with the hamadryads. In Art they appear clothed in goatskins. It may be added that the modern Greek peasant still believes in malicious goat-footed demons who inhabit the mountains.[122] In Roman mythology the fauns and silvani played the same part as Pan and the satyrs in Greece, and the same confusion existed as to whether they were individual or generic. The fauns seldom appeared to mortal sight, but their presence was made known in the weird noises and the ghostly appearances of the dark forest. When seen they had horns and goat’s feet, though in a later rendering they are more human in appearance. They guarded the flocks pasturing in the woods and, like other wood-spirits, also protected the cornfield. Silvanus and the silvani, as their name denotes, were tree-spirits even more emphatically than the fauns. According to Virgil the oldest inhabitants of Latium allotted to Silvanus a sacred grove and a special festival;[123] in later times he was universally regarded as the patron of the garden and field. At harvest time an offering of milk was poured over the roots of his sacred tree. In Art, Silvanus is represented as covered with hair (_horridus_) and standing under, or growing out of a garlanded tree, a crown of pine sprays on his head, a large pine bough in one hand and a sickle in the other. An inscription speaks of him as half enclosed in a sacred ash (_sacrâ semiclusus fraxino_). Another account associates the silvani with the fig-tree, and states that they were called by some _fauni ficarii_. Both fauns and silvani had an evil reputation for their supposed propensity to assault women, to carry off children, and to disturb the dreams of sleepers. The peasants of North Italy and Sicily still believe in wood-spirits, _gente selvatica_, closely resembling the old silvani. A Sicilian incantation is addressed to the spirit of the fig-tree and the devils of the nut-trees.[124] Taking the sum of their characteristics, Mannhardt is doubtless right in classing these legendary beings with the wood-spirits met with in the folk-lore of Northern Europe.