Tell them the Great Pan is dead!
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In this man from Chaeronea
the contrast between the Hellenes and the Hellenized has found its
finest expression. To live such a life in Smyrna or in Antioch was
impossible; it belonged to the soil of Greece like the honey of
Hymettus.
|
|
Theodor
Mommsen
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It was
on an
overcast morning, east of the isle of Echinades
during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, ten years before Plutarch was
born. The
season had already advanced and most of the shipping had ceased for the
winter.
Suddenly the crew of a merchant vessel heard a mysterious voice
calling out
through the haze from the distant beach. The invisible man repeated it
three
times: "When you reach Palodes
proclaim 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 town in the country, 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 is of a wholesome
and humanizing influence. In fact Plutarch is the invisible fortieth of
the 39 signatories of the United States Constitution.
Democracy
was born in Greece, under the olive trees, where the salty air carries
the smell of fishing-nets from the port of Athens. Solon’s bill of
rights was the first to give equal rights to all citizens and eliminate
birth as qualification for holding office. Solon (638 –
558 BC)
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.
The
new political order was resilient enough to withstand the onslaught of
Persia, even if that meant abandoning the city. After King Xerxes had
broken through at Thermopylae, the Athenians evacuated all civilians,
sending them to the islands of their allies. Shipping space was scarce,
pets and unnecessary belongings had to be left behind. Plutarch is
telling us of a dog that jumped into the water and swam for some time
alongside its family’s galley. In the end the dog didn’t make it to the
shore and drowned. At the beach its owners erected a memorial
commemorating the dog. The Athenians had their revenge at Salamis and
sunk the Persian fleet, securing the liberty of generations to come.
For Plutarch this was already ancient history, as distant as the Magna
Charta is to us. Living
under the
autocracy of Emperor Trajan, Plutarch finished his portrait of Solon with
a little sigh: "in a time when right
is weak, we should be grateful
that might assumes a form of gentleness.” It made him fully
appreciate 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).
Except
for Plutarch’s testimony, no mentioning of the incident in the Aegean
Sea has come down to us. It was still a time when even educated people
sensed an omen in every cough and every bird shooting across the sky.
Where did this voice in the mists of morning come from?
Was it
just the mischief of a drunken reveler? Was it an actor who trained 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 could die. In Egypt, the resurrected God
Osiris was believed to rule the afterlife, and in Bethlehem, the
alleged birthplace of Christ, there was, according to St. Jerome, an
ancient shrine of Tammuz. Every year the women would weep over his
death and beat their bare breasts. The Great Pan, however, was a symbol
of life itself, the great eater of death, the obstinate endurance in
the face of adversity and destruction, even when the whole cosmos
seemed in decline, and, in the words of Seneca, the mountains were
shrinking in size and the rivers running shallow.
After
Plutarch had finished his studies at Athens and Alexandria, he traveled
to Italy and familiarized himself with Roman affairs; he considered a
career in the Empire’s civil service, yet in the end decided against
it. Mommsen says: “There are men of greater talent and a
deeper
nature, but hardly any other author has reconciled himself with so much
grace
and composure to necessities, and conveys through his writings such a
sense of tranquility
of mind and the graces of his life."
That
may be so; Plutarch, however, harbored his own apprehensions, a nagging
feeling of living on borrowed time: why else should he have recorded
this mysterious voice from across the sea, if not as a sign for things
to come?
© – 1/17/2009 – by michael
sympson, 1,000 words, all rights reserved
