Proclaim the Great Pan is dead!

 

It was on a merchant vessel, drifting in the haze of an overcast morning, east of the islands of Echinades. Plutarch says it happened in the reign of Emperor Tiberius, ten years before he himself was born. The season had already advanced and most of the shipping in the Aegean Sea had ceased for the winter. Suddenly the crewmembers of the vessel heard a mysterious voice calling through the haze from the distant beach. The invisible man was calling three times: "When you reach Palodes proclaim that the Great God Pan is dead" (Plutarch).

Plutarch (46 – 120 AD.) was "one of the most charming, most fully informed, and altogether most effective writers of antiquity. Sprung from a family of means in a small country-town, he remained faithful to his home, enjoying domestic life with his wonderful wife and their children, surrounded by friends, male and female, a life content with the offices and honors which his own hometown was able to offer him, and not asking for more than the modest property he had inherited could provide." (Theodor Mommsen). Plutarch's Lives is a book of tremendous influence on our civilization. In the 17th century it was on the curriculum of every educated man, but unlike the Bible, Plutarch’s book was of a wholesome and humanizing influence. In fact Plutarch is the invisible 40th among the signatories of the United States Constitution.

Democracy was born on Greek soil, in the shade of olive trees gently moving their branches in the breeze. The salty air carried the smell of fishing-nets from the Pireius, the port of Athens. Solon’s charter was the first to give equal rights to all citizens and eliminate birth as a qualification for government office. Solon created democratic assemblies, so that no law should pass without a majority vote, and he invented the right of appeal and trial by jury, whereby an assembly of citizens, chosen at random, will speak the verdict. For Plutarch this was already a distant past, almost as distant as the Magna Carta is to us. Himself living under Emperor Trajan’s smiling autocracy, he finished his portrait of Solon (638 – 558 BC.) with a little sigh: "in a time when right is weak, we may be thankful if might assumes a form of gentleness.” It made him fully appreciated the importance of a trias politica: "For all we know, opposite parties or factions in a commonwealth, like passengers in a boat, serve to trim and balance the unsteady motions of power; whereas if they combine and come all over to one side, they cause to overset the vessel and carry down everything." Plutarch firmly believed that "men by nature is not a wild animal or born as an unsocial creature, but makes himself what he naturally is not by vicious habit. He is civilized and grows gentle by a change of place, occupation, and manner of life, as wild beasts become tame and domesticated. With good reason, those who train horses and dogs, endeavor by gentle means to cure their angry and intractable tempers, rather than by cruelty and beating" (Plutarch). Yet he was aware that times were about to change; that his own, not altogether golden age had come to an end.

Except for Plutarch’s testimony no mentioning of the incident in the Aegean Sea has come down to us. Whose voice was it, that startled the superstitious sailors on that misty morning? Was it just a drunken reveler’s mischief? An actor training his voice, using his mask as a bullhorn? Could it be a quote from a lost play by Euripides? Or was it the cry of some religious fanatic, an early Christian perhaps, who triumphed in the demise of a pagan deity? The ancients knew that gods can die. Every year women were beating their bare breasts over the death of Adonis until from a distance the voice of a shepherd announced his return to the living. In Bethlehem, the alleged birthplace of another savior who had died and returned from the dead, there was, according to St. Jerome, an ancient shrine of Tammuz, the dying and resurrecting deity of the seasons, and in Egypt, the God Osiris was believed to rule the afterlife. The Great Pan, however, was a symbol of life itself, the great conqueror of death, the obstinate endurance in the face of adversity and destruction. The philosopher Seneca, living under Emperor Nero, was perhaps the first to give expression to what was to become a common sentiment, that the mountains seemed no longer so tall and that the rivers were running shallow, that the whole cosmos was in decline. Plutarch after finishing his education at Athens and Alexandria, had traveled to Italy to familiarize himself with Roman affairs; he considered a career in the Empire’s civil service, and yet in the end decided against it. Mommsen says: “There are men of a more powerful talent and of a deeper nature, but hardly any other author has known how to reconcile himself so gladly and with such composure to necessities, and to impress upon his writings the stamp of his tranquility of mind and the blessedness of his life."

That may be so, but even in his narrow domestic circle, Plutarch could not shake off the feeling that he was living on borrowed time, that this voice out of the mist was a sign for things to come.

© – 1/17/2009 – by michael sympson, 950 words, all rights reserved