Pan of Arcadia: Goats, High Pastures and the Reed That Sang

Climb into the hills of Arcadia in early summer and you will hear the flocks before you see them. A hillside of goats sounds like a loose, unhurried orchestra: deep bells and small ones, each with its own note, chosen by the herder so that every animal can be found by ear among the kermes oak and the rocks. This is Pan’s country, and it is worth listening to it before reading about him, because nearly everything the ancients said about this god begins with goats, mountains and sound.

The baby who made his nurse run

The Homeric Hymn to Pan tells how Hermes came to Arcadia, land of many springs and mother of flocks, and there, though a god, tended sheep for a mortal man because he had fallen for the daughter of Dryops. Their child was born with goat’s feet, two horns and a full beard, and was noisy and laughing from his first hour. His nurse took one look at his face and fled. Hermes was not troubled. He wrapped the baby in the skin of a mountain hare, carried him up to Olympus and showed him to the gods, who were delighted, Dionysus most of all. The poet says they called him Pan because he gladdened them all, pantes, a pun rather than a real etymology.

Not everyone agreed on the family. Herodotus reports a Greek tradition that Pan was the son of Hermes and Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, while Apollodorus names Zeus and a nymph called Hybris. Such disagreements are typical of a god who began as a local figure of one mountain region and was only gradually taken up by the rest of Greece. The Hymn, at least, knows exactly how he spent his days: roaming the snowy crests and the rocky paths after game, and coming home at dusk with music.

At evening, back from the hunt, he sounds out alone, playing a sweet tune on his reeds; not even the bird who pours out her lament among the leaves of flowering spring could outdo him in song.

Anonymous, Homeric Hymn to Pan (our rendering)

Syrinx and the first pipes

How Pan came by his pipes is told by Ovid in the first book of the Metamorphoses, and the setting is pure Arcadia. Syrinx was a nymph of the cold mountains around Nonacris, a huntress who wanted to stay unmarried like Diana, the Roman Artemis. She dressed like the goddess and could be mistaken for her, except that her bow was made of horn instead of gold. Pan saw her coming down from Mount Lykaion and went after her. She ran until the sandy river Ladon blocked her way, and there she begged the water nymphs, her sisters, to change her shape.

When Pan grabbed for her, he caught only a handful of marsh reeds. He sighed, and his breath, moving through the hollow stems, made a thin and plaintive sound. Charmed by it, he cut reeds of unequal length, joined them with wax and kept the instrument, and the girl’s name, for himself. The Greeks called the panpipe a syrinx ever after.

The way Ovid frames the tale is a small joke of its own. It is told by Mercury to Argus, the hundred-eyed herdsman guarding Io in the shape of a heifer, in order to put him to sleep, and Argus nods off before it is finished. A herding story told to a herdsman as a lullaby: Ovid knew his pastoral. The same pattern of a nymph fleeing a god and becoming a plant on a riverbank appears in the story of Daphne and the laurel, and ancient readers enjoyed setting the two side by side. Centuries later, Apuleius gave Pan a gentler part, sitting by a river with the nymph Echo and offering sensible advice to the heartbroken heroine of Psyche’s tasks.

Noon, panic and the god of the fold

Pan’s day had a dangerous hour. In Theocritus, a goatherd refuses to play his pipe at noon, because that is when Pan rests from hunting, and the god has a sharp temper when woken. Anyone who has kept animals in a Greek summer understands the instinct behind it. At midday the flock stops grazing and crowds into whatever shade it can find, the herder lies down, and the hills fall quiet in a way that can feel watchful.

The sudden fright that sends a whole flock scattering for no visible reason was also Pan’s. From his name came our word for panic, and the fear spread from animals to armies. Herodotus tells how the runner Pheidippides, sent from Athens to ask Sparta for help before Marathon, met Pan on Mount Parthenion above Tegea. The god asked why the Athenians paid him no attention, though he had often been kind to them and would be again. After the victory they gave him a cave shrine below the Acropolis, with yearly sacrifices and a torch race.

In Arcadia his worship stayed rougher and closer to the ground. Pausanias heard that people living around Mount Maenalus claimed to hear Pan playing his pipes there. Theocritus mentions Arcadian boys beating the god’s image with squills when the hunting was poor, a reminder that a herdsman’s god was expected to earn his keep.

The flute, the bell and the road to summer pasture

Pan himself is no longer prayed to in Greek villages, and it would be a mistake to look for him behind every shepherd. But the life he stood for lasted remarkably long. Well into the twentieth century, herding families such as the Sarakatsani and the Vlachs moved their flocks between winter grazing in the lowlands and summer pastures in the mountains, and the pastoral year was often framed by two saints’ days: Saint George in April, when the climb began, and Saint Demetrius in October, when the animals came down. Our Festival Calendar follows those dates through the year.

The shepherd’s flute, the floyera, a simple end-blown pipe of cane or wood, is still played at village feasts, and bells for goats and sheep are chosen and matched with real care, because a herder can read the state of the flock from its sound. Cheese is still made in summer huts on the high pastures, and the midday rest in the shade remains the rule of the mountain.

None of this proves that Pan survived in disguise. It shows something simpler: the conditions that led Arcadians to imagine a goat-legged god of music and sudden fear are still there on the mountain. Stand among the pines above a flock at noon, when every bell has gone silent and nothing moves but the cicadas, and the old name comes easily to mind.