Sometime in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, a merchant ship carrying freight and many passengers ran out of wind in the Ionian Sea on its way to Italy. It was evening, and the vessel drifted toward the small island of Paxi while most of the people on board were still awake, a good many of them over their after-dinner wine. Then, according to the Greek writer Plutarch, someone on the island began shouting the name of the ship’s pilot.
The pilot was an Egyptian named Thamus, and Plutarch says that many on board did not even know his name. The voice called him twice and he stayed silent, but on the third call he answered, and the voice gave him an order:
“When you come opposite to Palodes,” it said, he was to “announce that Great Pan is dead.”
The passengers argued over whether to obey or to let the matter drop. Thamus settled it by deciding that if a breeze came up he would sail past and say nothing, and that if the sea stayed calm he would deliver the message. When the ship reached Palodes there was “neither wind nor wave,” so he stood at the stern, looked toward the land and called out the words exactly as he had heard them.
Before he had finished, Plutarch writes, there came “a great cry of lamentation” from many voices at once, mixed with exclamations of amazement. So many people had been on board that the story soon spread in Rome, and Thamus “was sent for by Tiberius Caesar.” The emperor, Plutarch adds, “became so convinced of the truth of the story that he caused an inquiry and investigation to be made about Pan.”
The source of the tale gives it unusual weight. Plutarch held an official position at Delphi, according to his Loeb translator Frank Cole Babbitt, and he placed this story inside a serious philosophical dialogue about why the oracles of Greece were falling silent. He also named the witness, a grammar teacher called Epitherses, and noted that some of the people present when the story was told had studied under the witness’s son.
So who, or what, was the Great Pan, and who was crying on that shore? The scholars at Tiberius’s court gave the emperor one answer. A Christian bishop born about two centuries later gave another, and a French scholar in 1907 proposed a third that turns on a single word. A classicist in 1996 offered a fourth that would change how the whole passage should be read.
The same conversation also produced a report from the islands off Britain, involving a sudden storm, the passing of a great spirit and a god held prisoner in his sleep. One of the men in that conversation may even have left his name in Roman Britain. Each of these stories raises the same puzzle, which is what ancient people thought was happening when a god could die.
