Pan

Pan is the god of shepherds and their flocks, of the wild Arcadian mountains, and of rustic music, and he wears his wildness on his body: horns, a beard, and the shaggy legs and hooves of a goat. He belongs to the uplands of Arcadia rather than to the ordered city, and he haunts the noonday stillness of the hills. From him comes the word panic, the sudden, groundless terror that could seize flocks, or armies, in lonely places was attributed to the god's presence. His instrument is the syrinx or pan-pipe, and myth explains its origin: pursuing the nymph Syrinx, who was changed into reeds to escape him, Pan cut the reeds and bound them into the first shepherd's pipe.

Pan's formal introduction to Athens is unusually well documented for a Greek cult's origin. Herodotus reports that in 490 BCE, before the Battle of Marathon, the runner Pheidippides, sent to seek Spartan help, encountered Pan on the road in Arcadia; the god complained that Athens neglected him despite his goodwill and promised to aid the city in the coming fight. After the Athenian victory the city made good on the implied bargain, establishing a cult to Pan in a cave on the northwest slope of the Acropolis and instituting annual torch-races and sacrifices in his honour, a rare case in Greek religion where the founding of an urban cult is tied to a specific, datable historical event rather than to unrecorded prehistory.

Two later developments gave Pan an afterlife well beyond Arcadia. Plutarch preserves a strange story that during the reign of Tiberius a sailor heard a voice across the water crying that the great Pan is dead, a tale later Christian writers seized on as marking the passing of the pagan gods, though its original meaning is disputed. Separately, ancient thinkers who liked to read gods as allegories connected his name with the Greek word pan, meaning all, and reinterpreted the rustic goat-god as a figure of the whole of nature or the universe. Both moves are receptions rather than parts of his original cult, but they carried the Arcadian herdsman-god into philosophy and, much later, into the Western imagination of nature.

Pan's image itself shifted over time in ways that paralleled other rustic gods. The very earliest known depictions, from around 490 BCE onward at Athens, show a startlingly bestial figure with a fully goat-like head and body scarcely distinguishable from an actual animal; only over the following century did Greek art soften him toward the more familiar type of a man with goat legs, horns and beard, closer to a satyr, and increasingly folded him into the retinue of Dionysus in vase painting and relief sculpture. Hellenistic poets, playing on his diffuse, everywhere-present wildness, sometimes multiplied him into many Panes, a plural swarm of minor goat-gods rather than one, a conceit that never displaced the single great Pan of cult and myth.