At the major dramatic festival of the year during the 5 th century BCE in classical Athens three competing playwrights staged a set of four plays; the first three were the tragedies familiar to us (such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Libation Bearers and Eumenides), the fourth, however, was the less well-known satyr play. This was a burlesque version of a traditional myth usually with the chorus of satyrs, or half human, half animal (goat or horse) specific to the genre, and with a close religious association with Dionysos—the god of wine theatre and transformation. Satyrs thus combine three categories of living being into one: human, animal and deity. They also straddle another two categories, those between wilderness and civilization. It is thought that satyr plays were most often set in a remote place, such as an island or a deserted seashore, and that they involved themes of captivity and liberation. In the Cyclops, the only satyr play surviving in its entirety, the action is located on the island of Sicily near Mount Etna, the great volcano that erupted violently in 475 BCE. The Sicily of the play, however, is not the real Sicily of Euripides’ time. It is a mythical place, populated by the giant Cyclopes imagined in some accounts as forging Zeus’ thunderbolts in the volcano’s furnace under the direction of Hephaestos.

This ‘dislocation’ both in terms of the more familiar palace or city background of Greek tragedy as well as the real geographical setting of a known place has a definite purpose: to show the absence of city, agriculture and, most importantly, of wine and of Dionysos. In Euripides’ Cyclops Silenos and his satyr sons are enslaved by the savage animal-hunting and cannibalistic Cyclops. The liberation of the satyrs, achieved by blinding him through drunkenness—that is through the agency of an uncivilized consumption of wine— represents not merely freedom from captivity but also the introduction of the civilized Dionysian worship in the context of theatre and in the civilized Greek polis.