Golden Age - Death of Pan and The Passing of The Golden Age

Death of Pan and The Passing of The Golden Age

A story is recounted by Plutarch in his De Oraculorum Defectu (The Obsolescence of Oracles) that sailors heard a cry, "Great Pan is dead!" sweeping across the waves of the Mediterranean, and at that moment the pagan oracles suddenly ceased. Pan is the only pagan god whose death is thus recorded. Subsequently, a tradition grew up among Christian commentators, notably Eusebius of Cesarea, (263–339), in his Praeparatio Evangelica, that the death of Pan coincided with the advent of Jesus, occurring either on the occasion of his birth or of his crucifixion on the first Easter:

The Oracles are dumb,
No voice or hideous hum
Runs through the archèd roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspire's the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell.
The lonely mountains o're,
And the resounding shore
A voice of weeping heard and loud lament.
From haunted spring, and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent.
With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn,
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.— John Milton, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity

This 17th-century passage, with its poignant evocation of the luminous world of Greek mythology (within a context, nevertheless, of Protestant devotion), greatly influenced 19th-century English Romantic poetry:

The Dead Pan
Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,
Can ye listen in your silence?
Can your mystic voices tell us
Where ye hide? In floating islands,
With a wind that evermore
Keeps you out of sight of shore?
Pan, Pan is dead.—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61)

Later Victorian and Edwardian writers lamented the death of paganism and its replacement by Christianity as the passing of a former Golden Age of physical beauty and sexual and political freedom, which they contrasted with what they saw as the sexual and political repressiveness and crass materialism of the modern era, as in Oscar Wilde's invocation of Pan:

Πάν
Pan
O goat-foot God of Arcady!
This modern world is gray and old,
And what remains to us of thee?....
Then blow some trumpet loud and free,
And give thine oaten pipe away,
Ah, leave the hills of Arcady !
This modern world hath need of thee!—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

While Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote:

Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.—"Hymn to Proserpine" (1866)