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The Great Island
dragon who guards the immortal water. Kill the dragon and you’ve
got it!’
So Alexander went and mounted his noble horse Bucephalus,
flashed through the jaws of the two mountains, killed the sleepless
dragon and took the glass of water.
But oh, the blessed man, when he got back he didn’t manage to
keep it. His sister saw it and poured it away, not knowing what it was.
It fell by chance on to a wild squill, which is why squills never wither.
Later, Alexander goes to drink the immortal water, but – where is
it? He asked his sister, who explained what she did. In his rage he
cursed her: ‘May you turn into a mermaid, fish from the waist down,
and suffer tortures till the world stand in the middle of the sea!’
God heard his curse, and since then voyagers can see her suffering
amid the waves. But she doesn’t hate Alexander. When she sees a boat
she asks, ‘Does Alexander live?’
And if the ship’s master is ignorant and unwise, and answers, ‘Dead’,
the girl in her excessive grief churns up the sea with her hands and her
tresses of hair, and swamps the boat.
Those who know better say, ‘He lives and reigns!’, and then the
much-tormented girl takes heart and sings sweet songs. And thus
sailors learn the new tunes.
That is how the squill became immortal. The story is also the most
common piece of merfolk lore to be found in the area of the Aegean
and the Cretan sea. But we must return to Pan.
His worship spread late. He came to Athens in the Persian wars,
intercepting the runner Pheidippides on his way from Athens to Sparta
to ask for Spartan help in the imminent battle of Marathon. Pan
appeared to Pheidippides, or so the athlete claimed, on Mount Parthenium,
and told him to ask the Athenians why they had been so unfriendly
to him in the past, since he had helped them and would do so
again. The Athenians believed the story and instituted a cult. It was
later that he was regarded as the ‘All-God’, owing to a mistaken
derivation of his name. For Alexandrian mythologists he was a symbol
of the universe. And it was in this universal aspect that he was announced
by Thamus to have died; as the story was understood at the
time, and later by the poets, that is. The probable explanation of the
story, not that it affects the strange beauty of it, was first pointed out by
Reinach. Thamus simply heard the ceremonial lamentation for the
Egyptian god Tammuz. The Greek for ׃’The all-great Tammuz is
dead’ and ‘Thamus, the great Pan is dead’ is phonetically exactly the
same.
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