Most of the Greek gods resided in the upper world. However, Pan was among the few that lived within it. While Zeus ruled from Olympus and Hades guarded a kingdom that no mortal could see, Pan lay asleep under a fig tree and allowed his goat legs to soak up the sun. No great temple stood over his head during most of his existence; instead, he had wildernesses and the supplicants that came to him were not kings but shepherds demanding help with their flocks. This contrast most likely accounts for the strange difference between the myths of Thebes and Mycenae and those of the palace at Knossos, which tell of an unfamiliar pantheon. They make a very different kind of landscape poetry, concerned not with kings and their desires but with the strange power of certain places. Joeephine Preston Peabody, who first translated them for American schoolchildren in 1897, begins her volume with just such a landscape, and she captures the sense of it superbly. This world is the starting point for all the tales to follow, and it is a fitting introduction to the next set of myths.
Who Was Pan in Greek Mythology?
The Arcadian deity Pan was the rural god of shepherds, flocks, and wildernesses, as well as the rugged and untamed countryside. He is depicted with the upper torso of a human and the lower body of a goat, with short horns. He was also part of an older religious tradition that predated the Olympian gods by several centuries. First, he did not have grand temples; he had caves. Additionally, while the gods had their retinues of satyrs, fauns, dryads, and hamadryads, these were the elemental powers that the old religion shared. The woodlands were his domain, where he wandered as a rustic shepherd. Moreover, he was the namesake of the word panic, according to the Greeks. They connected the idea with an unanticipated and inexplicable sensation of dread, such as one might experience while trekking alone on a desolate hillside at sunset. In fact, the sensation was most likely no different for the Greeks than it was for me when walking alone in the woods after dark.
Syrinx and the Origin of the Panpipes
The best-known Pan story is a chase that ends badly and then, unexpectedly, becomes music. Pan saw a nymph named Syrinx in Arcadia, one of Artemis's hunting companions, and fell for her instantly. She took one look at the horns and the goat legs and ran. He chased her to the bank of a river she couldn't cross, and there she begged her sisters, the water-nymphs, to save her. They did the only thing they could think of. When Pan finally closed his arms around her, he was holding a handful of river reeds. He stood there defeated, and the wind moved through the reeds and made a low, sighing note. Pan heard it and went still. He cut the reeds to different lengths, bound them side by side, and blew across the open tops — and the instrument that came out of that grief still carries her name. The syrinx, or panpipes, is one of the oldest wind instruments in the world, and versions of it exist from the Andes to Romania. The Greeks explained its invention with a story about a god who lost the thing he wanted and got a song instead. Ovid tells this version in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, right alongside Daphne — and the parallel is deliberate.
He closed his arms around her and found only river reeds. The wind moved through them, and out of that grief he built an instrument.
Echo and Narcissus: Two Halves of One Story
Echo was a wood-nymph with a talent for talking. Too much talent, as it turned out. In Ovid's telling she kept Hera occupied in long conversations while Zeus slipped away from his affairs, and when Hera worked out what was happening she stripped Echo of speech — leaving her only the ability to repeat the last words she heard. Then Echo fell in love with Narcissus, a beautiful young hunter who had already broken a long line of hearts. She couldn't say what she felt. She could only wait for him to speak first and hand his own words back to him. When he called out "Come here!", she could answer "Here!" — and did. He turned, saw her, and recoiled. She faded from a body into a voice, and that voice is still lurking in every canyon and empty stairwell, waiting for you to say something first.
Narcissus got his own punishment, and it fit exactly. Bending over a still pool, he saw his reflection and fell in love with it. He couldn't touch it without destroying it. He couldn't leave it. He stayed there until he wasted away and became the flower that bends its head over water. The Greeks were making a point about the two ways love can go wrong: love that has no voice of its own, and love that can only see itself. It's a sharp piece of psychology for a story this old, and both names ended up in the language. Echo and narcissism are Ovid's characters still doing their jobs 2,000 years later.
He couldn't touch it without destroying it. He couldn't leave it. Where he finally fell, a flower grew that still bends its head toward water.
The Other Transformations: Dryope, Clytie and Daphne
The wood-folk are full of people who used to be people. Dryope was a young mother walking with her sister and baby when she picked a lotus blossom for the child. The plant bled. Inside it was a nymph, hidden. The punishment was immediate and terrible in its neatness: Dryope's feet took root where she stood, bark climbed her legs, and she had just enough time left to hand over her baby and ask her sister to bring him to play in her shade sometimes. A tree that used to be a mother.
Clytie loved the sun god and had no way to reach him, so she sat on the ground and watched him cross the sky, every day, until she rooted where she sat and became a flower that turns its face to follow the sun. Most English retellings, including Peabody's, call her a sunflower. She isn't one, and can't be. Sunflowers are native to the Americas and didn't reach Europe until after 1500. Ovid's Clytie becomes a heliotrope — a small purple Mediterranean flower whose name literally means "sun-turner." The sunflower crept into the story during the 1800s because it was the plant English readers pictured. It's a small mistranslation, but it tells you something about how myths keep getting quietly updated by whoever is holding the pen.
Daphne ran from Apollo and prayed for escape as he closed on her. Her father, a river god, turned her into a laurel tree. Apollo, unable to have her, made the laurel his own sacred plant — which is why victors in Greek games and Roman triumphs wore laurel crowns, and why we still talk about resting on your laurels.
Apollo made the laurel his sacred plant — which is why victors at Greek games wore crowns of it, and why the phrase survives today.
The Oracles: Voices in Caves and Trees
Peabody makes one observation in this section that's easy to skim past and worth stopping on. Some of these voices in the landscape weren't tragic at all. They were useful. Certain caves, certain springs, certain trees were held to speak — and where they spoke, Greeks built. The oracle at Dodona was originally the sound of wind in an oak grove, interpreted by priests. Delphi began as a fissure in the rock at the foot of Mount Parnassus. Kings crossed seas and emptied treasuries to hear a sentence from a place like that. So the wood-folk stories aren't only about danger and loss. Greek religion started with the assumption that the landscape was awake and had opinions. Sometimes it chased you. Sometimes it answered your question.
Where These Myths Come From
Nearly everything above reaches us through Roman hands rather than Greek ones. Ovid's Metamorphoses, finished around 8 CE, is the single most important source: Syrinx and Daphne appear in Book 1, Echo and Narcissus in Book 3, Clytie in Book 4, Dryope in Book 9. Ovid organised his entire epic around transformation, which is why the wood-folk are so heavily represented in it. For Pan himself, the older material is the Homeric Hymn to Pan and scattered references in Greek pastoral poetry, especially Theocritus. Josephine Preston Peabody's Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew (Houghton Mifflin, 1897) is a Victorian schoolroom retelling, written as a companion to Hawthorne's Wonder-Book — charming, readable, and softened for children, so treat it as a gateway rather than a source.
Read next: The Judgment of Midas — where Pan gets ambitious and challenges Apollo to a music contest, with consequences for a bystander.
