Description
"When you come opposite Palodes, announce that the great Pan is dead."
The voice heard at sea, as recorded by Plutarch, On the Obsolescence of Oracles (1st century AD).
The year is somewhere around 30 AD. A cargo ship is working its way up the western coast of Greece when the wind dies near the island of Paxos, and the passengers are still awake when a voice comes across the water. It calls the pilot by name, Thamus, and gives him a job: when you pass Palodes, announce that the great Pan is dead. Plutarch reports that Thamus obeyed, shouted the news at the headland, and heard a great wailing rise from the empty shore. Rome talked about it for years. The emperor Tiberius opened an inquiry.
Pan was the god of the wild. Of shepherds and their flocks, of mountains, caves and beehives, of hunters, of rustic music, of everything that lives outside the city walls. He was born in Arcadia, the roughest corner of Greece, son of Hermes and a nymph, and he arrived already complete: horns, beard, goat legs, hooves. His mother took one look and ran. His father, delighted, wrapped him in hare skins and carried him up to Olympus, where every god fell in love with the little monster, and that is how he got his name: Pan, meaning all, because all of them rejoiced. He did not stay. He went back down to the goats and the noon heat, the only major god who never held a seat on Olympus. He guarded flocks, chased nymphs, played music, and punished whoever disturbed his midday nap with a sudden, inexplicable dread that still carries his name: panic. At Marathon he offered it to Athens as a weapon, and an empire ran.
His flute tells his method. A nymph named Syrinx turned herself into reeds to escape him; he cut the reeds, bound them, and made music out of the broken body. So when the bat knocks him into two hundred and fifty pieces every forty-four seconds, laughing on his vine-wrapped trunk with the grapes still in his hand, he already knows how this works. Broken things, in his hands, become instruments.
His magic is reed green, pale cane to forest earth. His verse comes from the one Rare that never left the temple, and its middle line is inherited word for word from Hermes, his father: travel through veins of copper. The last line reads end of the great work. It is. Struck forty times, one for every Rare in the collection. The sea said the great Pan is dead. The chain answers.