To save this word, you’ll pan fried chicken breast to log in. Pan is often depicted playing a panpipe.

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Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Pan, in Greek mythology, a fertility deity, more or less bestial in form. Hermes, but a comic invention held that he was the product of an orgy of Odysseus’s wife Penelope with her many suitors.

Like a shepherd, he was a piper and he rested at noon. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. In his earliest appearance in literature, Pindar’s Pythian Ode iii.

The worship of Pan began in Arcadia which was always the principal seat of his worship. Arcadia was a district of mountain people, culturally separated from other Greeks. Arcadian hunters used to scourge the statue of the god if they had been disappointed in the chase. Being a rustic god, Pan was not worshipped in temples or other built edifices, but in natural settings, usually caves or grottoes such as the one on the north slope of the Acropolis of Athens. These are often referred to as the Cave of Pan. Archaeologists while excavating a Byzantine church of around 400 CE in Banyas, discovered in the walls of the church an altar of the god Pan with a Greek inscription, dating back to the 2nd or 3rd century CE.

The inscription reads, “Atheneon son of Sosipatros of Antioch is dedicating the altar to the god Pan Heliopolitanus. Pan descriptive of his figure with the horns of a goat. There was a sanctuary at Troezen, and he had this epithet because he was believed during a plague to have revealed in dreams the proper remedy against the disease. Pan illustrated in the Flemish magazine “Regenboog”. Draft for the woodcut “Pan” of Jozef Cantré. Hermes and a wood nymph, either Dryope or Penelope of Mantineia in Arcadia.

Accounts of Pan’s genealogy are so varied that it must lie buried deep in mythic time. Like other nature spirits, Pan appears to be older than the Olympians, if it is true that he gave Artemis her hunting dogs and taught the secret of prophecy to Apollo. Pan was the son of Hermes and Penelope, he was born only eight hundred years before Herodotus, and thus after the Trojan war. Herodotus concluded that that would be when the Greeks first learnt the name of Pan. The goat-god Aegipan was nurtured by Amalthea with the infant Zeus in Crete. Representations of Pan on 4th-century BC gold and silver Pantikapaion coins.