Pan

Also Known As: Greek Πάν; identified with the Roman Faunus, and closely associated with the Arcadian Aegipan
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He rules the wild uplands and their flocks, plays the reed pipes he invented, and can fill men and animals with a sudden groundless terror that carries his name.
Role in Mythos: He is the goat-legged herdsman god of Arcadia, patron of shepherds, goatherds, hunters and the mountain nymphs, worshipped in caves and on peaks rather than in temples.
Relation to Humans: He gives increase to the flocks and luck in hunting, and the people who kept him did so in the open country where they worked, at cave mouths and springs. He is also dangerous to meet, particularly at noon and particularly asleep, and the Arcadians felt free to beat his statue when he failed to deliver.

Noon on an Arcadian hillside is the dangerous hour. The cicadas cut out all at once, the goats stand with their heads down in the white glare and their shadows pooled beneath them, and a shepherd with any sense lies still under the pines and leaves his pipes in his belt. The god is asleep somewhere up in the rocks. He wakes badly.

Pan belonged to the high country of Arcadia, the stony interior of the Peloponnese where the ground is limestone and the villages are small and the wealth is measured in goats. He had no great temple there. His holy places were caves, springs, the mouths of gorges and the bare tops of the pasture mountains, and Pausanias, walking the region in the second century, catalogued them one after another: shrines on the peaks, a sanctuary of Pan Nomios on the Nomian mountains above Lykosoura, and beside that Pan a fire that was never allowed to go out.

His body was the first thing anyone mentioned. Man above and goat below, and the join was never disguised or apologised for. He had a broad hairy chest, a full beard, a flat pushed-in nose, skin reddened by weather, two horns curving back from the forehead, and from the thighs down the shaggy haunches, cloven hooves and stub tail of a he-goat. The oldest surviving hymn to him calls him goat-footed and two-horned in nearly the same breath as it calls him a lover of noise.

That hymn also gives his birth. Hermes came down into Arcadia, land of many springs and mother of flocks, and took service as a herdsman to a mortal man, because he wanted the daughter of Dryops. The child she bore him was, in the hymn’s phrasing, marvellous to look upon, goat-footed, two-horned, loud and laughing from the first minute. His nurse took one look at the bearded face and the hooves, jumped up, and ran. Hermes was delighted. He wrapped the baby in a mountain hare’s skin, carried him up to Olympus and set him among the gods, who all took pleasure in him, Dionysus most of all, and they gave him the name Pan.

Other traditions put him together differently. Pindar made Apollo his father. A line running through Herodotus, Apollodorus and Hyginus gives him Hermes and Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, and Pausanias preserves the ugly companion story that Odysseus came home, learned what she had done, and sent her away to Mantineia. The most cynical version dispenses with a divine father altogether and makes him the child of all one hundred and eight suitors at once, which is a bad pun on his name rather than a genealogy, since it reads the pan in Pan as the Greek word for all. The hymn’s own explanation does the same thing. Whatever the etymology actually is, and the honest answer is that it is contested, the ancients heard “all” in it and built stories accordingly.

Set the parentage aside and watch him work. Evening on the mountain, the heat going out of the rock, and he comes down off a ridge tired from hunting with a lynx skin over his shoulder. At the spring the nymphs are already singing, the sound doubling off the cliff behind them, and he takes his place in the ring and puts the pipes to his mouth, and the mountain hares stop in the scrub to listen.

The pipes are his and he made them himself, at some cost to somebody else. He wanted the naiad Syrinx and she did not want him, and she ran, and at the river Ladon the water stopped her. She called out to her sisters and they answered by changing her. When Pan closed his arms he was holding an armful of marsh reeds, and his own breath moving through them made a thin complaining note. He cut them, bound them side by side in unequal lengths, and gave the instrument her name. That is the syrinx, the panpipes, and the story is plain about what it cost.

The pattern repeats. The nymph Pitys became a pine tree getting away from him. Echo never noticed him at all, being wholly taken up with Narcissus. He is not a charming story about the countryside.

He was also, once, decisive in a battle. Herodotus records that in the days before Marathon the Athenians sent the runner Pheidippides to Sparta for help, and that on Mount Parthenion above Tegea the god called him by name. Pan wanted to know why the Athenians paid him no attention, when he had been well disposed to them, had helped them before, and would again. They believed the report. After the Persians were beaten the Athenians cut him a shrine in the cave under the north-west face of the Acropolis and honoured him from then on with annual sacrifices and a torch race.

What he had promised to do to the Persians is the thing he is best remembered for. A voice in an empty place, coming from nowhere identifiable, and a herd bolting, or a camp waking in the dark and running from nothing at all. The Greeks gave that particular contagious fear his name and we still use it. Beyond panic his gifts were the practical ones of the people who kept him: fertility in the flocks, meat and cheese and kids, luck for hunters. He gave oracles too in the old days, according to Pausanias, and the nymph Erato who married Arcas was his prophetess. His music was good enough to be worth arguing about, and in Ovid he takes on Apollo in a contest, plays his rustic tune with enormous satisfaction, loses on the judgment of the mountain god Tmolus, and is applauded only by Midas, who gets a pair of donkey’s ears for the opinion.

His limits are as clear as his powers. He is a small god of a poor and specific place, and his authority thins out where the wild country does. He can be bargained with, and worse. Theocritus has a speaker threaten him outright: grant this, or may the Arcadian boys flog you with squills across the ribs and shoulders whenever the meat on your altar runs short. That is not blasphemy but ordinary practice, aimed at a god close enough to hand to be punished.

And in the end the ancient world reported his death, which it did for no other Greek god. Plutarch, writing on why the oracles had gone quiet, passes on an account he had from Epitherses, a schoolmaster and the father of the orator Aemilianus. A ship becalmed off Paxi in the reign of Tiberius, most of the passengers still awake and drinking after dinner, and a voice from the island calling the Egyptian pilot Thamus by name, three times, and telling him that when he reached Palodes he was to announce that the great Pan was dead. Thamus decided to sail past in silence if there was wind. At Palodes there was no wind and the sea lay flat, so he stood at the stern, faced the land and said it. Before he had finished, a great cry of mourning went up from the shore, not one voice but many, mixed with astonishment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pan in Greek mythology?

Pan is the Greek god of shepherds, flocks, hunting and the wild uplands, worshipped above all in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese. He is half man and half goat, with a bearded human upper body and the horns, haunches and cloven hooves of a goat. He was honoured at caves, springs and mountain peaks rather than in built temples.

What does Pan look like?

Pan has a man’s head and torso, with a full beard, a flat nose, weathered ruddy skin and two horns curving back from his forehead, joined to the legs of a goat with shaggy haunches, cloven hooves and a short tail. The oldest surviving hymn to him calls him goat-footed and two-horned. He was born looking this way, and his nurse is said to have run at the sight of him.

Where does the word panic come from?

The word comes from Pan. The Greeks blamed sudden, groundless, spreading terror in lonely places and in armies on him, on the idea that his voice or his presence could set a herd or a camp running from nothing. Herodotus reports that before the Battle of Marathon Pan promised the Athenian runner Pheidippides that he would be useful to them, and after the victory the Athenians gave him a cave shrine below the Acropolis with yearly sacrifices and a torch race.

How did Pan invent the panpipes?

Pan pursued the naiad Syrinx, who fled from him and was stopped at the river Ladon, where her sisters transformed her into a stand of marsh reeds. Pan found himself holding reeds instead of the nymph, and heard his own breath make a thin sound through them. He cut them, bound them together in unequal lengths, and named the instrument the syrinx after her.

Is it true that Pan died?

Plutarch records the report, which is unique in Greek myth. In his essay on the decline of the oracles he relays a story from a schoolmaster named Epitherses about a ship becalmed near the island of Paxi during the reign of Tiberius, when a voice ordered the pilot Thamus to proclaim at Palodes that the great Pan was dead. Thamus did so, and a loud chorus of lamentation came back from the shore.