Pan

Part man and part goat, Pan was the Greek god of wild places, shepherds, and flocks. The Homeric Hymn to Pan makes him the son of Hermes, born in Arcadia with a goat’s feet and two horns. He roamed the mountains hunting and playing on reed pipes, and the nymphs who danced with him mostly ran from his advances. One of them, Syrinx, became the reeds from which he made the first panpipes.

Family

The Homeric Hymn to Pan says that Hermes came to Arcadia, where he was tending sheep in the service of a mortal man, and fell in love with the rich-haired nymph, the daughter of Dryops. She bore him a son who was marvellous to look at from birth (Homeric Hymn 19, lines 28–37). Pan’s mother is therefore a nymph whose father was Dryops, and his father is Hermes. Lucian also makes Pan call Hermes his father (Dialogues of the Gods 2).

Other accounts give him a different mother. Herodotus reports that the Greeks said Penelope and Hermes were the parents of Pan (Histories 2.145). In the Epitome of Apollodorus, Penelope was sent away by Odysseus after Antinous seduced her, and when she came to Mantinea in Arcadia she bore Pan to Hermes (Epitome 7.38). Apollodorus also mentions a different Pan, a son of Zeus and Hybris, from whom Apollo learned the art of prophecy (Library 1.4.1). The early sources give Pan no wife and no well-attested children.

Pan’s Role

Pan was a god of the mountains and of the creatures that live on them. The hymn calls him the shepherd-god, who has every snowy crest, mountain peak, and rocky summit for his domain. He wanders through thickets and along streams, climbs to the highest peak overlooking the flocks, and, as the hymn describes him, runs over the mountains killing wild beasts (Homeric Hymn 19, lines 1–13).

Portrayal

“From his birth,” the hymn says, the child was “marvellous to look upon, with goat’s feet and two horns – a noisy, merry-laughing child.” The nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard, was afraid, and ran away, leaving the baby behind. The poet adds that he wears a spotted lynx-pelt on his back and delights in high-pitched songs in a soft meadow where crocuses and hyacinths grow (Homeric Hymn 19, lines 23–26 and 36–39).

Name

According to the hymn, Hermes picked up the child at once, wrapped him in the warm skins of mountain hares, and carried him to the seats of the immortals. He set him down beside Zeus and showed him to the other gods, and all the immortals were glad, Dionysus most of all. “They called him Pan,” the poet says, “because he delighted all their hearts” (Homeric Hymn 19, lines 40–47). The poet is playing on the Greek word for “all.”

Realm and Role

The hymn sets Pan’s birth in Arcadia, “the land of many springs and mother of flocks,” where Hermes has his sacred precinct as god of Cyllene (lines 30–31). In the evening, as he returns from the hunt, he plays softly on his reed pipes, and the mountain nymphs join him singing by a dark spring while Echo wails about the mountain-top. The hymn says that not even the bird that pours out her lament among the leaves in flowering spring could surpass his melody (Homeric Hymn 19, lines 14–22).

Pan is also a god who helps in war. Herodotus tells how the Athenian runner Philippides, sent to Sparta before the battle of Marathon, met Pan on Mount Parthenion above Tegea. Pan called him by name and told him to ask the Athenians why they paid him no attention, though he was well disposed to them and had often been of service. The Athenians believed the story, and when they prospered they founded a sacred precinct of Pan beneath the Acropolis and honoured him ever after with yearly sacrifices and a torch-race (Herodotus, Histories 6.105).

Pan’s Shout

The Greek word panikos, “panic,” is linked in ancient texts with the goat-god of the mountains. Hyginus, citing Eratosthenes, says that when Zeus fought the Titans it was Aegipan, Zeus’s companion and foster-brother, who first threw the enemy into the fear called panikos (Astronomica 2.28). In the same passage Hyginus says that Pan leapt into a river to escape Typhon, making the hind part of his body a fish and the rest a goat.

Pan and Music

Pan was the god of the reed pipe. The hymn calls him a lover of merry noise who plays sweetly on his pipes, and Ovid tells how the pipe came to exist and how Pan once challenged Apollo to a contest.

Syrinx

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hermes tells the story to the hundred-eyed Argus. Syrinx was the most famous of the Naiad nymphs of Nonacris in Arcadia, and she had often escaped the satyrs and the other gods who pursued her. She honoured Diana and, with her bow, was sometimes taken for the goddess herself. One day, as she came back from Mount Lycaeus, Pan saw her. He wore a wreath of sharp pine needles on his head and began to speak to her, but she fled without listening until she came to the sandy stream of the river Ladon. The water blocked her way, and she begged her sisters to change her. When Pan thought he had caught Syrinx, he was holding marsh reeds instead of the nymph. As he sighed, the wind moving in the reeds gave out a thin sound like a lament. Charmed by this new art and by the sweetness of the sound, Pan said, “This will remain a union between me and you,” and he joined reeds of unequal length with wax, so that the pipe kept the girl’s name (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689–712).

The Musical Contest

Ovid tells the contest in Book 11. Pan was playing his songs to the tender nymphs on a hillside when he dared to scorn Apollo’s music, and the contest was held before the old mountain-god Tmolus as judge. Pan played on his rustic reeds, and his barbarous song delighted Midas, who happened to be present. Then Tmolus turned toward Phoebus, and his whole forest turned with him. Apollo came with golden hair crowned with laurel, a robe dyed in Tyrian purple trailing the ground, and a lyre inlaid with gems and Indian ivory. When he played, Tmolus ordered Pan to yield the reeds to the lyre. Everyone approved the judgement of the sacred mountain except Midas, who called it unjust. Apollo would not let such stupid ears keep a human shape, so he drew them out, covered them with white hair, made them unsteady at the base, and gave Midas the ears of a slow-moving ass (Ovid, Metamorphoses 11.146–179).

Pan and His Nymphs

Syrinx was not the only nymph Pan pursued. Pitys, according to Nonnus, hated marriage and fled over the mountains to escape the unlawful wooing of Pan, and she vanished into the earth (Dionysiaca 42). In Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods, Pan himself boasts to Hermes that his lady-friends are Echo and Pitys and all the Maenads of Dionysus (Dialogues of the Gods 2). In the Homeric Hymn, Echo is a voice on the mountain-top as the nymphs dance with him.

Virgil tells how Pan won the moon. He says that Pan, the Arcadian god, deceived Luna with the gift of snow-white wool and called her into the deep woods, and she did not scorn his call (Georgics 3.391–393). Virgil says “if it is right to believe it.”

The Death of Pan

In Plutarch’s dialogue, the speaker Philip says that his grammar teacher Epitherses once sailed for Italy on a ship with many passengers. In the evening, near the Echinades Islands, the wind dropped and the ship drifted toward Paxi, and from the island a voice was heard calling the name of Thamus, an Egyptian pilot not known by name even to many on board. Thamus answered on the third call, and the voice ordered him: “When you come opposite to Palodes, announce that Great Pan is dead.” At Palodes the wind dropped, and Thamus called the words from the stern toward the land. A great cry of lamentation answered him, not from one person but from many. The story spread to Rome, and the emperor Tiberius had it investigated; his scholars concluded that this Pan was the son of Hermes and Penelope (Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles 17). Philip tells the story as evidence that beings of the class of demigods, or daimons, can die.

Pan Sources

The Homeric Hymn to Pan (Hymn 19) tells of Pan’s birth and his life in the mountains. Further sources are Herodotus, Histories 2.145 and 6.105; Apollodorus, Library 1.4.1 and Epitome 7.38; Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689–712 (Syrinx) and 11.146–179 (the contest with Apollo); Virgil, Georgics 3.391–393; Hyginus, Astronomica 2.28; Nonnus, Dionysiaca 42; Lucian, Dialogues of the Gods 2; and Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles 17.

See Also: Hermes, Syrinx, Apollo, Arcadia, Midas, Selene, Echo