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Drawing on a corpus of 7,000 antique vases, this article conceptualises the figure of the satyr as a paroxysmal body. Very often depicted on amphora for drinking, the satyr is intimately associated with wine (whose tendency to overflow made ingestion a delicate affair) and with coitus, too. The article examines the ritual of the maenads and the animality and violence which forever threatened to overwhelm the Dionysian universe and erected the satyr into a figure who was highly revealing of the paroxysmal state