Pan, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Pan was the god of pastures, of shepherds and goatherds, of wild and rocky places, of the mountainous interior of the Peloponnese (especially Arcadia, his proper home). He was a son of Hermes by various mothers (the nymph Dryope is most often given), and was born with the lower body and horns and ears of a goat — so unprepossessing in appearance that his mother fled at the sight of him, but Hermes wrapped him in a hare-skin and brought him up to Olympus where the gods (and especially Dionysus, with whose train Pan associated) found him delightful. He chased nymphs through the woods, played his syrinx (the panpipes — named for the nymph Syrinx, who in fleeing his pursuit was transformed into a bed of reeds, from which Pan made the instrument that bore her name), and was the bringer of "panic," the sudden inexplicable terror that fell upon men and herds in the lonely places (named for his power, and originally meaning the fear that Pan sent).

His cult was originally local to Arcadia, but it spread throughout Greece after the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE, when (as Herodotus tells us) the runner Pheidippides, on his way to Sparta to seek aid against the Persians, encountered Pan on Mount Parthenion; the god complained that the Athenians neglected him despite his goodwill toward them; Pheidippides reported the encounter; the Athenians, after their victory at Marathon, established Pan's cult on the Acropolis in gratitude. Thereafter Pan's small cave-shrines spread across the Greek mainland and the islands.

The most poignant Pan-narrative is also the strangest. The historian Plutarch, writing in the late first century of our era, reports a curious tale: in the time of Tiberius (early first century CE), a ship sailing from Greece to Italy was becalmed near the islands off Paxos, and the helmsman heard a great voice calling from the shore: "Tell them when you reach Palodes that the Great Pan is dead." The helmsman, when the ship came opposite Palodes, called out the message; and from the shore arose a great wailing, as of many voices in lamentation. The pagan reading was that one of the great gods had died (an unprecedented event); the Christian reading, current from at least the second century, was that the report dated from the moment of the Crucifixion and signaled the end of the pagan world. The truth of the report is unrecoverable; but the tale's combination of credulity and pathos, its glimpse of a religion sensing its own mortality, has retained its hold on the imagination for nineteen centuries.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

The Homeric Hymn to Pan (Hymn 19) gives his birth-narrative; Herodotus 6.105 gives the Pheidippides encounter and the establishment of his cult at Athens. The Pan-and-Syrinx episode is in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.689–712. The death-of-Pan tale is in Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum 17 (Moralia 419b–d); the Christian appropriation of the story is in Eusebius and later. The Roman counterpart Faunus, with whom Pan was sometimes conflated, was a separate Italian god treated in Volume IV.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Child ofHermesHe was a son of Hermes by various mothers (the nymph Dryope is most often given)
Companion ofDionysusespecially Dionysus, with whose train Pan associated
Merged intoFaunusThe Roman counterpart Faunus, with whom Pan was sometimes conflated
Named as the same god asMinand in the Greek period with Pan (his cult-city Akhmim was called Panopolis by the Greeks)
Named as the same god asFaunuswas identified by the Romans with the Greek Pan, though his original Italic character was somewhat different

The same god in other rooms

The ancient sources themselves name these as one god under different names. See Amun, Min, Pan and Faunus hung together

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Sea, the Wild and the Wind. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1600–1100 BCE: Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
c. 1100–800 BCE: Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
late 8th–7th centuries BCE: The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
7th–6th centuries BCE: Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
6th–5th centuries BCE: Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
5th century BCE: Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
4th century BCE: Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
323–31 BCE: Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.