The Story of Pan and Syrinx

At a Glance

• Central figures: Pan, the goat-legged god of the wild and rustic music; and Syrinx, a wood nymph of Arcadia who had sworn chastity as a follower of Artemis.
• Setting: The forests and rivers of Arcadia, including the river Ladon; drawn from the tradition of Greek pastoral myth.
• The turn: Cornered at the river Ladon with Pan close behind her, Syrinx prays to the river nymphs for rescue - and they transform her into a bundle of hollow reeds.
• The outcome: Pan, reaching the riverbank, finds only reeds in his arms; his breath moving through them produces a faint, melodic sound that stops him cold.
• The legacy: Pan fashions the reeds into the syrinx - the pan pipes - which become his defining instrument and his lasting emblem, carrying the name of the nymph he never caught.

Pan was not a god anyone found easy to look at. He had the legs, hooves, and curved horns of a goat, the broad body of a man, and a face that split somewhere between the two - shaggy, grinning, forever caught between the human and the animal. He roamed Arcadia, the rough upland country of the Peloponnese, through pine forest and dry hill pasture, and wherever he went he carried his pipes and his appetites in roughly equal measure. The nymphs of that country knew to run when they heard him coming.

Syrinx heard him and ran.

The Follower of Artemis

She was a wood nymph, daughter of the rivers and forests of Arcadia, and she had modeled herself deliberately on Artemis - the same straight posture, the same quiver, the same absolute refusal to be claimed by any man or god. Where Artemis hunted with hounds and torchlight, Syrinx moved quietly through the same territory, taking her vow of chastity seriously in a world that rarely took such vows seriously. Her beauty, which was considerable, drew attention she did not want. She had learned to ignore suitors. She had become skilled at disappearing into the tree line before an approach could turn into a confrontation.

Pan was harder to lose than most. He had spent centuries in that same wild country. He knew every fold in the hills, every ford, every animal path through the bracken. When he saw Syrinx moving through the forest - her bearing, the quiver on her back, and for a moment the mistaken certainty that he was looking at Artemis herself - he stopped, looked harder, and understood his mistake. And then, because he was Pan, he came toward her anyway.

The Chase Through Arcadia

She ran the moment she understood what was behind her. Not a measured withdrawal, but a full run, through the pines and down the long slope where the trees thinned toward the river valley. Pan followed. His goat legs were built for rough ground, for loose stone and root-tangled earth, and he moved fast - faster than a man would have moved through that terrain. Syrinx could hear him.

She cut toward the river Ladon, following its sound before she could see it, hoping for a ford, a crossing, anything that would put water between herself and whatever was behind her. There was no ford. The Ladon ran wide there, cold and moving with purpose, and she arrived at the bank with no ground left under her. She turned. She prayed.

The prayer was directed at the river nymphs, those cool presences that lived in the current and along the muddy margins, and they heard her.

The Reeds at the Ladon

What Pan’s hands closed on was not Syrinx. It was a stand of hollow reeds along the waterline, tall and pale-green, bending slightly in the air off the river. He stood there, water cold against his hooves, holding reeds. His breath came hard and ragged from the run, and when he exhaled - a long, defeated sigh - the air moved through the uneven cuts at the tops of the reeds and drew out a sound: thin, mournful, unsteady, and then, for a moment, something close to music.

He stood still for a long time, listening. The reeds shifted against each other, and the sound shifted with them.

The Making of the Syrinx

Pan cut the reeds. He took several lengths of different sizes, trimmed them against each other, and bound them in a row with wax and cord - short tubes beside long ones, a descending rank of hollow pipes that he pressed to his lips and tested one by one. The instrument he made from Syrinx he named after her: the syrinx, the pan pipes, the instrument that would follow him through every story told about him afterward.

It was not a god’s instrument in the way Apollo’s lyre was a god’s instrument. The syrinx was a shepherd’s tool, a rough thing made on a riverbank from whatever was at hand. But what it produced - that particular sound, half breath and half note, the music of air moving through something hollow - carried something in it that a lyre did not. It was capable of the sound of wind through grass, of the particular loneliness of an open hillside at dusk. Pan played it as he walked, alone, back up into the hills of Arcadia, and the music spread out behind him into the trees.

Pan in the Wilderness

He went back to the life he had lived before: wandering the uplands, appearing suddenly in lonely places, frightening travelers at noon with the unreasoning terror that still carries his name. He played the pipes at the edges of shepherd camps, and the shepherds would hear the music drifting out of the dark and not quite know what to make of it. He competed, once, in a music contest against Apollo and lost - or refused to concede the loss, depending on who told the story - but the pipes stayed with him regardless, inseparable from him in every image left on pottery and stone.

The syrinx had a sound no other instrument had. It was the sound of breath meeting hollow reed, of desire converted into something that moved through air and arrived in the ears of whoever happened to be nearby, gods or mortals or animals, all of them equally capable of stopping and listening. The nymph at the river Ladon was gone - translated, changed, distributed across an instrument - and what remained was the music Pan made from what she had become, in the same wild country where she had run and he had chased her and the river had intervened between them.