Pan

The nurse who runs away

A child is born on Mount Cyllene with goat’s feet, two horns and a beard. His nurse looks at his face and runs. His father, the god Hermes, wraps the abandoned baby in the skins of mountain hares and carries him to Mount Olympus, the home of the gods.

The gods react differently. They are delighted with the strange child, and the god Dionysus most of all. This story comes from a Homeric Hymn, one of a group of early Greek poems in praise of a god. The hymn links his name, Pan, with the pleasure he gives them all. The scene takes him from rejection by a mortal nurse to a welcome among the gods, and his appearance stays the same throughout.

Pan’s body places him on the line between human settlements and animal life. He looks after flocks and keeps company with shepherds, yet his hooves and horns belong to the animals they herd. His music comes from reeds, and he prefers land far from the city. The hymn follows him across wooded peaks. Sometimes he hunts, and sometimes he comes back at evening to play music among the mountain nymphs.

Why Pan stops the runner

Before the battle of Marathon, Athens sends a runner named Philippides to ask Sparta for help. As he crosses Mount Parthenion above the city of Tegea, he meets Pan. The god calls him by name and asks why the Athenians pay him no attention. He bears them goodwill, he says, and has helped them before.

The historian Herodotus reports the meeting as Philippides himself told it. After the city’s success, the Athenians take the message seriously. They set up a precinct, a sacred plot of ground, for Pan below the Acropolis, the great rock of Athens. They also hold yearly sacrifices and a torch race for him. A god at home in the mountains of Arcadia gains a lasting place in Athens, because one runner says he met him on another urgent journey.

In this story Pan does not claim the victory for himself. His complaint is about recognition and fair exchange: he has helped Athens, and Athens has not thanked him. The new worship puts that right after the battle.

From sudden fear to public worship

Later the word “panic” was taken from Pan’s name. It linked sudden, unexplained terror with his presence in lonely places or in battle. The early sources do not need that word to make him unsettling. The nurse’s flight already shows a fear she cannot control, caused by a form that does not fit familiar categories.

The Pan of Herodotus is calmer. He speaks, names a grievance and promises future goodwill. The city takes a meeting that no one could check and turns it into public acts that repeat each year: a precinct, a sacrifice and a race. Pan’s wildness remains, and Athens now gives it a fixed place and fixed days.

Roman writers compared Pan with their own gods Inuus and sometimes Faunus, but neither is an exact match. The Greek god’s birth in Arcadia, his father Hermes and his meeting with the runner belong to his own tradition.

The cave above Delphi

High on Mount Parnassus, above Delphi, is the Corycian Cave. Pausanias, an ancient writer who described the places of Greece, says the cave was sacred to the Corycian nymphs and above all to Pan. The spot places Pan above the sanctuary of the god Apollo at Delphi, on ground also linked with rites for Dionysus.

The cave was excavated in 1970 to 1971. The finds included pottery, small bronze figures, wind instruments and more than 25,000 animal astragals, or knucklebones. Modern scholars link the great number of these small bones with divination, the practice of seeking signs of the future, carried out in the cave.

The finds show worship on a small scale. There was no huge statue and no marble temple in a city. Thousands of handled bones built up on the cave floor, small objects left where people believed the nymphs and the goat-footed god would receive them.