[5] Another proposed etymology derives the name from an ancient Peloponnesian word meaning 'the full ones', alluding to their permanent state of sexual arousal.

[17] The Slavic leshy also bears similarities to satyrs, since he is described as being covered in hair and having "goat's horns, ears, feet, and long clawlike fingernails.

[22][21] They were evidently subjects of veneration, because Leviticus 17:7 forbids Israelites from making sacrificial offerings to them[24] and 2 Chronicles 11:15 mentions that a special cult was established for the śě'îrîm of Jeroboam I.

[23] Isaiah 13:21 predicts,[26] in Karen L. Edwards's translation: "But wild animals [ziim] will lie down there, and its houses will be full of howling creatures [ohim]; there ostriches will live, and there goat-demons [śĕ'îr] will dance.

"[27] Similarly, Isaiah 34:14 declares: "Wildcats [ziim] shall meet with hyenas [iim], goat-demons [śĕ'îr] shall call to each other; there too Lilith [lilit] shall repose and find a place to rest.

[8] As time progressed, this became the general trend, with satyrs losing aspects of their original bestial appearance over the course of Greek history and gradually becoming more and more human.

[60] In Aristophanes's comedy Thesmophoriazusae, the tragic poet Agathon declares that a dramatist must be able to adopt the personae of his characters in order to successfully portray them on stage.

[64] Alcibiades concludes that Socrates's role as a philosopher is similar to that of the paternal satyr Silenus, because, at first, his questions seem ridiculous and laughable, but, upon closer inspection, they are revealed to be filled with much wisdom.

[62] One story, mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories and in a fragment by Aristotle, recounts that King Midas once captured a silenus, who provided him with wise philosophical advice.

[66] The comic playwright Melanippides of Melos (c. 480–430 BC) tells the story in his lost comedy Marsyas of how, after inventing the aulos, the goddess Athena looked in the mirror while she was playing it.

[66] Later, this story became accepted as canonical[65] and the Athenian sculptor Myron created a group of bronze sculptures based on it, which was installed before the western front of the Parthenon in around 440 BC.

[99] In this way, satyrs became vehicles of a metaphor for a phenomenon extending far beyond the original narrative purposes in which they had served during earlier periods of Greek history.

[35] Unlike classical Greek satyrs, fauns were unambiguously goat-like;[35][109] they had the upper bodies of men, but the legs, hooves, tail, and horns of goats.

[35][109] The first-century BC Roman poet Lucretius mentions in his lengthy poem De rerum natura that people of his time believed in "goat-legged" (capripedes) satyrs, along with nymphs who lived in the mountains and fauns who played rustic music on stringed instruments and pipes.

[111] The poet Virgil, who flourished during the early years of the Roman Empire, recounts a story in his sixth Eclogue about two boys who tied up the satyr Silenus while he was in a drunken stupor and forced him to sing them a song about the beginning of the universe.

[112] The first-century AD Roman poet Ovid makes Jupiter, the king of the gods, express worry that the viciousness of humans will leave fauns, nymphs, and satyrs without a place to live, so he gives them a home in the forests, woodlands, and mountains, where they will be safe.

[57][113] The Roman naturalist and encyclopedist Pliny the Elder conflated satyrs with gibbons, which he describes using the word satyrus, a Latinized form of the Greek satyros.

[114] He characterizes them as "a savage and wild people; distinct voice and speech they have none, but in steed thereof, they keep a horrible gnashing and hideous noise: rough they are and hairie all over their bodies, eies they have red like the houlets [owls] and toothed they be like dogs.

[66][117] The third-century Greek biographer Philostratus records a legend in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana of how the ghost of an Aethiopian satyr was deeply enamored with the women from the local village and had killed two of them.

[57] Macrobius also equates Dionysus and Apollo as the same deity[57] and states that a festival in honor of Bacchus is held every year atop Mount Parnassus, at which many satyrs are often seen.

[122] Isidore of Seville (c. 560 – 636) records an anecdote later recounted in the Golden Legend, that Anthony the Great encountered a satyr in the desert who asked to pray with him to their common God.

[137] Edwards states that the King James Version's translation of this phrase and others like it was intended to reduce the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the creatures described in the original Hebrew text by rendering them as names of familiar entities.

[142] Many early accounts of the orangutan describe the males as being sexually aggressive towards human women and towards females of its own species, much like classical Greek satyrs.

[148] The French emperor Napoleon III awarded the Academic painter Alexandre Cabanel the Legion of Honour, partly on account of his painting Nymph Abducted by a Faun.

[149] This painting was bought that same year by an American named John Wolfe,[149][150] who displayed it publicly in a prominent location in the bar at the Hoffman House, a hotel he owned on Madison Square and Broadway.

[146]The late nineteenth-century German Existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was either unaware of or chose to ignore the fact that, in all the earliest representations, satyrs are depicted as horse-like.

[152] Nonetheless, he was the first modern scholar to recognize the full importance of satyrs in Greek culture and tradition, as Dionysian symbols of humanity's close ties to the animal kingdom.

[153] Penny Florence writes that the "generic scene displays little sensuality"[135] and that the main factor distinguishing it is its tone, because "[i]t does not seem convincing as a rape, despite the nymph's reluctance.

[146] The 1917 Italian silent film Il Fauno, directed by Febo Mari, is about a statue of a faun who comes to life and falls in love with a female model.

[154] Instead, Mr. Tumnus wears a scarf and carries an umbrella and lives in a cozy cave with a bookshelf with works such as The Life and Letters of Silenus, Nymphs and their Ways, and Is Man a Myth?.