Satyr Play

Theater in Athens worked differently than theater today. Plays were performed in a competition at the annual City Dionysia festival. Each playwright would write three tragedies, linked by theme and performed one after another. Understandably, six hours of bloodshed, torment, and woe had a way of depressing the audience.

So, after each tragic trilogy, the selected playwright would conclude things with a satyr play. A satyr play was a ridiculous, partially tragic, partially comic parody (or satire) of a popular legend. They were loaded with sex, drunkenness, and black comedy. The satyr chorus were notorious for their costume, which featured large penises.

The Romans didn't borrow this tradition from the Greeks, and the satyr plays didn't fare too well as the years went on. Only one example of this genre, Cyclops by Euripides, survives. However, another play, The Tracking Satyrs by Sophocles, has a large number of surviving fragments.


 * Black Comedy: The story of the cyclops is about a cannibalistic monster getting stabbed in the eye with a tree trunk. Cyclops manages to make it funny.
 * Crosses the Line Twice
 * Eye Scream
 * Gag Penis
 * Gonk: The satyr costumes
 * Refuge in Vulgarity
 * Squick
 * Values Dissonance: The surviving fragment of one of Aeschylus' Satyr Plays has a scene where an infant Perseus is allowed to masturbate a satyr. It may have been considered funny at the time, but now it comes across as pedophilia.
 * Cyclops features several jokes about rape.