Pan: The Hill God Who Gave Us Panic

Every time a market crashes, a crowd stampedes or a newsreader warns against ‘panic buying’, English is quoting a goat-legged god from the Greek hills. Pan had no Parthenon. He lived in caves and on bare ridges, took modest offerings from herders and hunters, and was blamed for the sudden, senseless terror that can grip an army or a flock. He is also the only Greek god whose death was ever reported, in a story that has puzzled readers since antiquity. For a minor rustic deity, he has had an enormous career.

A baby who frightened his nurse

The fullest account of Pan’s birth is the Homeric Hymn to Pan, a short poem whose date is uncertain but which is probably younger than the oldest hymns in the collection. Hermes, it says, fell for the daughter of a man named Dryops and worked as a shepherd to be near her. Their son arrived goat-footed, two-horned, noisy and laughing. His nurse took one look at his bearded face, leapt up and ran. Hermes, delighted, wrapped the infant in the skins of mountain hares and carried him up to Olympus, where every god was charmed and Dionysus most of all. They called him Pan, the poet explains, because he delighted them all – pan meaning ‘all’ in Greek.

That is a pun, not an etymology. Linguists suspect the name goes back to an older word for a herdsman or guardian of flocks, which suits a god who began as a protector of goats. Ancient writers did not agree on his mother, either. Herodotus reports that the Greeks of his day called Pan the son of Penelope and Hermes, a startling footnote to the Odyssey; other writers made Zeus his father. The confusion fits. Pan was the kind of god everyone knew and nobody had filed properly.

Arcadia before the postcards

Pan’s home ground was Arcadia, the mountainous heart of the Peloponnese, a region of herders and hunters whose people liked to claim they had lived there before the moon existed. Pausanias, travelling in the second century CE, recorded Pan’s sanctuaries on Mount Lycaeus and reported that people living near Mount Maenalus said they could hear the god playing his pipes there.

This Arcadia was not soft. In one of Theocritus’s poems, written in the third century BCE, a singer prays that Pan will be kind, so that the Arcadian boys need not whip his statue with squills when the hunting is poor – a glimpse of a rough bargain between worshipper and god. In the first Idyll, a goatherd refuses to play his pipe in the heat of the day:

Not at noon, shepherd. We may not pipe at noon. We are afraid of Pan: that is when he rests, worn out from the hunt, and he has a temper – bitter bile sits always at his nostril.

Theocritus, Idylls 1 (our rendering)

The Arcadia of soft-focus shepherds came later. Virgil’s Eclogues turned it into a landscape of longing, and painters such as Nicolas Poussin made it a dream of lost innocence, complete with a tomb inscribed Et in Arcadia ego. The original was goat country, and its god could bite.

Ovid tells how Pan got his pipes. In the first book of the Metamorphoses, Mercury tries to lull the hundred-eyed watchman Argus to sleep with the story of Syrinx, an Arcadian nymph who fled Pan’s advances to the banks of the river Ladon and begged her sisters to change her. Pan lunged and came away clutching marsh reeds. His sigh across them made a thin, plaintive sound, and he bound reeds of unequal length together with wax to keep her voice. Ovid’s joke is that Argus falls asleep before the tale is finished, so the poet has to summarise the ending himself. He had already told almost the same plot in the same book, with a laurel in place of the reeds: the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo. Rustic gods and Olympians alike, it seems, ended these chases holding a plant.

A crueller tale survives in Longus’s novel Daphnis and Chloe. There Pan, jealous of the nymph Echo’s music, drives the shepherds mad, and they tear her apart and scatter her songs across the land. Earth hides the pieces, and they still answer back.

How a god became a feeling

The word ‘panic’ has a battlefield origin story. Herodotus relates that in 490 BCE, as the Persians landed at Marathon, the Athenians sent a runner named Philippides to Sparta to ask for help; later writers know him as Pheidippides. Crossing Mount Parthenion above Tegea, he heard Pan call his name. Why, the god asked, did the Athenians pay him no attention, when he was well disposed to them, had often been useful and would be again? After the victory the Athenians founded a shrine to Pan in a cave beneath the Acropolis and honoured him with yearly sacrifices and a torch race. Herodotus, careful as ever, notes that this is what Philippides himself said.

Herodotus does not claim that Pan scattered the Persians, but the idea attached itself to him. Greek writers spoke of panikon fear – terror that strikes without visible cause, spreading through a camp at night or a herd on a hillside, and English eventually inherited the word. Pausanias, describing the Gauls’ attack on Delphi in 279 BCE, says their army was seized by exactly such a fright, and that groundless terrors were said to come from Pan. The god of lonely uplands became the god of the moment when a group loses its collective mind.

He could be gentler, too. By the late fourth century BCE Pan could open a comedy: in Menander’s Dyskolos, he speaks the prologue himself from his shrine at Phyle in the Attic hills. In Apuleius’s novel he sits by a riverbank and gives sensible advice to the heartbroken Psyche.

The day Great Pan died

Plutarch, writing around 100 CE, puts the strangest Pan story of all into his dialogue On the Obsolescence of Oracles. One speaker recounts what he heard from his old teacher Epitherses. Sailing to Italy, Epitherses’ ship lost its wind near the islands of Paxi. A voice from the shore called out the name of the Egyptian pilot, Thamus. Twice he said nothing; the third time he answered. When you come opposite Palodes, the voice told him, announce that Great Pan is dead. When they reached Palodes the sea lay flat and windless, so Thamus shouted the message from the stern. At once a great lament rose, not from one voice but from many, mixed with cries of amazement. The story reached Rome, and the emperor Tiberius summoned Thamus to question him.

In Plutarch’s dialogue the point is that spirits – daimones – might age and die, which could help explain why oracles had fallen silent. Later readers had bigger ideas. The Christian historian Eusebius, in the fourth century, saw the story as a sign of demons dying out in the age of Christ. In the sixteenth century Rabelais had his giant Pantagruel suggest that Great Pan was Christ himself. Elizabeth Barrett Browning built a whole poem, ‘The Dead Pan’, on the passing of the old gods. A twentieth-century suggestion, associated with the French scholar Salomon Reinach, is more deflating: passengers may have overheard a ritual lament for the Near Eastern god Tammuz, something like ‘Thamus the all-great is dead’, and heard in pammegas, ‘all-great’, the words ‘Pan megas’, ‘Great Pan’.

The reports of Pan’s death were exaggerated. Kenneth Grahame gave him a luminous chapter in The Wind in the Willows, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, which Pink Floyd later borrowed for their first album. Arthur Machen turned him into horror in The Great God Pan. J. M. Barrie named a pipe-playing boy after him. And anyone who has walked alone through the bush at midday, in that heavy stillness when even the birds give up, and felt the back of their neck prickle for no reason, has met the feeling the Greeks put his name to.