38 Proceedings 
The Cercopes, whose name apparently means ‘the tailed 
ones,’ were associated by Plutarch with the Seileni, and have 
been supposed by others to be identical with the Cyclopes, 
although they are conceived in a more droll and playful spirit. 
They were located on the inaccessible rocks above the Pass of 
Thermopylae, and descended thence to annoy and rob travel- 
lers. Two of them having robbed Heracles while he slept were 
caught by him and suspended by their feet from a pole.* Ac- 
cording to a story of which we have only the late authority of 
Ovidt, the Cercopes inhabited the Pithecusae, rocky islands in 
the Bay of Naples, and were turned into monkeys for their 
sins, 
In considering the Seileni and Satyrs we must dismiss from our 
minds the obese tipsy dotards and the horned and goat-legged 
monsters of the Decadence and of Roman art. In their earliest 
graphic forms they are almost indistinguishable, and are mere 
wild men of the woods with hairy bodies, bestial snouts, pointed 
ears and tails. The tails, like those of the Centaurs and Cer- 
copes, so far from supporting the Ape-man theory, tell rather 
the other way. It appears that tailed men have been recorded}, 
but only as rare ‘freaks,’ and biologists consider that our im- 
mediate ancestors were tailless, like the anthropoid apes. But 
may not the addition of a tail have been the first step taken by 
the Greek imagination in the transformation of a brute-like 
man into a composite monster? On early Macedonian coins 
the Seileni are sometimes tailless. 
It is especially in the folk-lore and art of the Ionic Greeks 
round the Aégean coasts, and of their neighbours the barbarians 
of Thrace and Phrygia that the Seileni appear. The Phrygians 
were an offshoot of the Thracian stock. As the Seileni were also 
known to the Illyrians, cognate with the Thracians, but far 
removed from all Ionian influences, it is more reasonable to 
suppose that the Ionians obtained the conception from the 
Thracians than vice versa, though of course they may have had 
* The scene appears on a metope from Selinus, of which there is a 
cast in the British Museum. 
+ Metam. xiv. 89 ff. 
t See O. Mohnike, Ueber geschwdnzte Menschen, Miinchen, 1878, also 
Frederici in Archiv fiir Anthrop., 1908, 16 ff. 
