This refers to Silenus “statuettes” and also a “Silenus casket.”

Don’t know ancient Greek, myself.

True, but then you’d probably expect some to have survived, or at least to have survived long enough to have been mentioned later on.

My theory that the outer figure was disposable or destroyed in the opening was intended to account for the lack of extant examples of these items. (Although, there’s still the problem of where the internal figures went, if they were better constructed or more valuable than the surrounding bust.)

On a recent trip to South China, we bought a hinged fish amulet in that opened to reveal a tiny figure of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, perhaps a reference to the “mercy pools” in Buddhist temples at which fish are let go.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”—Shakespeare

Cicero thought highly of paradox as a rhetorical device, and Renaissance poets, apparently took the hint.

“[The fool in literature is ] privileged to speak out, usually on behalf of a satirical view of actuality, against received opinion, convention, and social cliché, the Fool (in literature at least) was a rich source for paradoxical utter-
ance. From Socrates, who alleged that his only
knowledge was the limitation of his own knowledge,
via Saint Paul and the Pseudo-Dionysius to Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus, docta ignorantia was attributed to the gifted fool. Alcibiades’ image from the Symposium, of Socrates as an ugly Silenus-box containing the sweetest perfume, was explicated by Erasmus in the Adagia, exploited in the Moriae encomium (Praise of Folly), adapted by Rabelais in the Preface to Gargantua, and referred to by a host of other paradoxists as a visual emblem of the functions of the formal paradox, evidently ugly but with a sweet truth within. Falstaff belongs in this company of wise fools, though he has none of the spirituality of Erasmus’ “Saint Socrates”; Lear’s fool is wisely ignorant, speaks in grammatical paradoxes and touches on many paradoxical topics (nothing, shadow, folly, codpiece, world-upside-down); Lear himself is
schooled to the piercing accuracy of moral and social judgment characteristic of the highest forms of Renaissance folly.”—”Literary Paradox” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/dhi.cgi?id=dv3-10

Maybe they were like the first Transfomers: Dionysus In Disguise!

…and worst of all, if any survived they’d now be too valuable to open. Sure, you might be able to x-ray them, but the likelihood is that this hasn’t been done. Intriguing.