‘ 
x 
Proceedings 39 
similar tales of their own. The Doliones, a Thraco-Phrygian 
tribe, not only claimed descent from Seilenos, but regarded him 
__as the ancestor of the human race. While the Seileni are repre- 
sented on the early Attic and Corinthian vases with human legs 
and feet, they appear on the somewhat older coins of Macedonia 
and the Cyclades (perhaps in some cases before 600 B.c.), with 
hoofs attached to human ankles, or with the legs of horses or 
asses. We have seen that the Neandertal race had bent and hairy 
legs. May not these have suggested the hind-legs of animals? 
Sixth century vases from Athens, Thebes, and Corinth, of 
which there are good examples in the British Museum, present 
a most curious type of Seileni. They are figures standing upright 
or slightly leaning forward, with human legs, powerful bony 
arms, long tails, bodies more or less covered with curly hair, long 
pointed ears, very retreating foreheads, massive brow-ridges, flat 
noses and prognathous bestial muzzles, in some cases excessively 
prominent. I do not suggest that the artists had actually seen 
men of the Neandertal type, but merely that they follow an 
ancient artistic tradition.t 
The name Sezlenos is explained by Tomaschek as standing 
for *seslenos, z.e. one with a rolling gait, or one fond of leaping. 
They haunt caves in the wild mountains, especially near streams, 
and are regarded with dread. A relief in the British Museum 
from Xanthos in Lycia shows two of the human-footed variety 
attacking a bull and a boar with tree-trunks, which reminds 
one of the Centaurs. 
+ On the other hand M. Edmond Pottier remarks in his Dourds (Eng. 
tr. I909, p.60): ‘It would not be difficult to prove, documents in hand, 
that the large anthropoid apes met by the Phoenicians in their ex- 
plorations in Africa, and drawn by them on their metal cups of the 
seventh century, furnished the Ionian artists, when combined with 
the Bes of the Egyptians, with the prototype of the hairy and shaggy 
Silenus, with the flat-nosed face, that one sees on certain sarcophagi 
of Klazomenai.’ This of course cannot apply to the original Seilenos 
conception, as found among the Balkan tribes, but to the Ionian art- 
istic rendering of it. May not the sources of the latter be various ? 
The Seileni depicted by the vase-painters Brygos and Douris, and 
figured in the above-mentioned work, are considerably later than those 
I have described above, and while more refined and human in form 
are more simian in their postures, in fact they are models of animal 
grace and agility. 
