difficult to deal with, it would appear, if the treatment adopted by me is right, that the Satyrs are subsequently stricken with madness by Pan for having violated his sanctuary in or adjacent to the dwelling of Cyllene, and that Apollo takes steps to heal them. For the rest of the probable action see my text and notes, and also Chapter II.
The above plot is manifestly based on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Hymn III.). Sophocles however departs from his original in five respects.
First, he introduces Silenus and the Satyrs. This is, so to speak, a merely conventional departure. Silenus and the Satyrs (or occasionally, it would seem, some similar characters) had to be introduced whenever any story was dressed up as a Satyric play. In just the same way Euripides imports them into the story of the Cyclops.
Secondly, as a result of introducing Silenus and the Satyrs, Sophocles attributes the discovery of the oxen to their activities, not, as the Hymn, to information given to Apollo by a countryman who had seen Hermes driving the cattle.
Thirdly, whereas the Homeric Hymn represents indeed Hermes as living on Mt. Cyllene, but speaks of the oxen as having been left by him at Pylos, Sophocles puts the oxen also on Mt. Cyllene. He clearly takes this course in order to observe the dramatic unity of place.
Fourthly, in the Hymn there is no sort of connexion, direct or indirect, between the theft of the oxen and the making of the lyre. Sophocles introduces a connexion by representing Hermes' use of ox-hide, taken from the stolen cattle, in or about the lyre as furnishing the Satyrs with the clue which led to their recovery. Dramatic unity of action demands a connexion.
Fifthly, Sophocles goes outside the borders of the story told in the Hymn by introducing the Nymph Cyllene instead of Maia. I think that this variation, like that of the omission of the informer, is due, though less obviously so, to the fact of the introduction of the Satyrs. In the first place it would hardly have been seemly to bring into contact with the Satyrs a female personage of the dignity of Maia; and in the second place, even if Maia had appeared, she could not well have descended
