Pan- Greek GodDeity"Goat-Footed"

Birth and the Mountains

The Homeric Hymn to Pan names Hermes as his father and the nymph Dryope as his mother. When Dryope first saw her newborn, goat-legged, horned, bearded, and already laughing, she fled in terror. Hermes was delighted with his strange son. He wrapped the infant in hare skins and carried him to Olympus, where the assembled gods laughed with joy at the child. Dionysus laughed loudest. They named him Pan because he delighted them all.

Pan's homeland was Arcadia, the mountainous heart of the Peloponnese, a region so isolated that its people claimed to be older than the moon. While other Greeks built cities and navies, the Arcadians remained shepherds among the peaks. Pan lived in caves and mountain hollows, a god who never joined the assembly on Olympus. Mount Lycaeum was sacred to him, and Pausanias describes the sound of his pipes echoing among the crags of Mount Parthenion. He napped at noon in shaded glens and danced by moonlight with nymphs and satyrs. The Arcadians worshipped him with offerings of goats and milk. Wise shepherds kept silence at midday, for waking him brought his wrath.

The Syrinx

Pan pursued the nymph Syrinx through the wilderness of Mount Lycaeum. She fled until she reached the river Ladon and could run no farther. She begged the river nymphs to save her, and they turned her into marsh reeds. When Pan embraced what he thought was his beloved, he held only hollow stalks. The wind blew through them and produced a mournful sound. "This communion at least shall I have with you," he said, and cut reeds of varying lengths and bound them with wax. Ovid tells the story in the Metamorphoses: thus was born the syrinx, named for the nymph who became it.

Pan's other pursuits ended no better. Pitys fled him and was turned into a pine tree; he wore wreaths of its boughs ever after. In Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Pan drove the nymph Echo mad, and shepherds maddened by Pan tore her apart and scattered her remains across the earth. Only her voice survived, repeating words from rocks and hollows.

Panic

Pan gives his name to "panic," the sudden, irrational terror that seizes people in wild and lonely places. The Greeks called it panikon deima, "Pan's fear." Alone in the mountains with no visible cause, the heart races and a certainty of danger takes hold. If others are present, the terror spreads at once, and everyone flees like stampeding cattle.

Pan sent this fear to punish those who disturbed his noon rest or to aid his favorites in war. The noon hour was sacred: Pan slept then, and the mountains belonged entirely to him. Theocritus warns in his first Idyll that the goatherd must not play his pipes at midday for fear of rousing Pan. Euripides invokes this terror in the Rhesus, where it seizes soldiers without cause.

Marathon

In 490 BCE, the Athenian messenger Pheidippides was running through the mountains of Arcadia to beg Sparta for help against the Persian invasion. Pan appeared to him on the road near Mount Parthenion. The god asked why the Athenians did not honor him, since he had often helped them and would do so again. Herodotus records the encounter.

The Spartans arrived too late. The Athenians fought at Marathon without them and won. After the victory, Athens established a cult of Pan in a cave on the north slope of the Acropolis, with annual sacrifices and torch races. The Persians, the Athenians believed, had broken and fled under a panic sent by the god who had promised his help on the mountain road.

Pan and Dionysus

The two gods lived at civilization's edge, and their followers mingled freely. Pan joined Dionysus's wild processions: satyrs and maenads danced to his pipes as they roamed the mountains.

Polyaenus records a stratagem Pan devised during Dionysus's legendary campaign in India. He arranged the army in a valley and had them shout in unison. The echoes multiplied until the enemy believed they faced an overwhelming force. Panic, deployed as a weapon of war.

The Death of Great Pan

During the reign of Emperor Tiberius, a sailor named Thamus was passing near the island of Paxi when a divine voice called out across the water: "Thamus, when you reach Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead."

Thamus obeyed. When he made the announcement at Palodes, the shore erupted in groans and lamentation from unseen voices. The story reached Tiberius, who summoned his philologists. No one could explain it. Plutarch preserves the account in On the Obsolescence of Oracles.