Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 317
shall give them the victory over the Persians. They
honour many gods but have forgotten me."
" Who are thou ? " said Philippides.
" I am Pan," answered the voice. " The wild places
of the Earth are mine."
When Philippides announced that potent and marvel-
lous Arcadian experience of his to the Athenians, then in
camp at Marathon, they at once erected an altar to Pan.
They were encamped at the time in an intricate mountain-
ous and forestine region. Upon the altar they burned a
kid, and cakes of flour and honey, and poured out libations
of wine, while their trained singers, chosen youths, danced
round the altar and sang loud hymns in honour of the wild
God. And Pan heard them, and was pleased ; and he
came down out of his native Arcadia into their camp ;
and
in the ensuing battles he roared with his widely-echoing
voice against the Persians ; and sent a disastrous panic
terror through the great Persian host !
And ever after, the
beautiful Athenians, though a quite agricultural and
Imperial and a maritime people, never failed to worship
duly the wild god of the wild places of the earth. They
made him one of their national Gods, and provided for
him a house on the south side of the Pnyx ; which was
probably visited by St. Paul when five hundred years
later he wandered round Athens, observing and con-
sidering.
We smile, I hope kindly and indulgently, at the legend,
but must feel that under all its strange forms and modes of
expression, there is something eternally true and right
in such a feeling. The wild places of the earth, the