The Seba library treats Sileni in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Kerényi, Karl, Martha C. Nussbaum, Auerbach, Erich).
Silenus, or Hermes, with the little Dionysus form a kind of variation on the same theme, and are the two sides of the same reality.
Kerényi argues that Silenus and Hermes are not merely associated but structurally equivalent, both expressing the phallic, soul-bearing principle that sustains the divine child Dionysus.
, Hermes Guide of Souls, 1944thesis
Socrates, he tells us, is like one of those toy Sileni made by craftsmen. On the outside they look unremarkable, even funny. But what you are moved to do, what you cannot resist doing once you see the crack running down the middle, is to open them up.
Nussbaum reads Alcibiades’ Sileni-image as the central hermeneutical figure of the Symposium: the philosopher’s outer ugliness conceals an interior of transcendent beauty, demanding an act of opening.
, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis
Alcibiades ou dialoge de Platon intitulé Le Bancquet, louant son precepteur Socrates, sans controverse prince des philosophes, entre aultres parolles le dict estre semblable es Silenes.
Auerbach traces how Rabelais invokes the Platonic Sileni-comparison for Socrates as the founding image for his own stylistic principle of low surfaces concealing high wisdom.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis
Archaic vase painting introduces superhuman beings, sileni or satyrs, as wine pressers, and they remain the indispensable performers of this act in ancient art down to the end of antiquity.
Kerényi establishes the Sileni as the mythological agents of wine-pressing in cultic art, their role inseparable from the dismemberment song of the lenos and hence from the death and renewal of Dionysus.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
Ithyphallic mule dancing among drunken sileni. Fragment of an amphora, by the Amasis painter, that was found on Samos and later lost in the sack of the museum.
This iconographic catalogue entry documents the ithyphallic, drunken Sileni of Attic vase-painting as a recurring visual type within the Dionysian procession imagery Kerényi interprets.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
Silenus 305–308
Seaford’s index entry locates Silenus within the satyr-play context of his study of money and the early Greek mind, indicating a minor analytical presence in that argument.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside