Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

In Arcadia the nymph Syrinx, companion of Artemis’s train and devoted to virginity, fled the lust of Pan—goat-footed, horned god of flocks and mountains. He pursued her to the stream of the Ladon (Ovid); she begged her sister nymphs (or the river) to transform her. Pan, thinking he had caught her body, held only marsh reeds. Wind through the hollow stems made a plaintive sound; Pan bound reeds of unequal length with wax and so invented the syrinx (panpipes), consoling himself with the music of what she had become. Greek cult knew Pan as Arcadian, noisy, and sudden; the Hymn to Pan celebrates his music and his dancing with nymphs without this metamorphosis tale. Ovid’s episode supplies the erotic chase-and-reed aetion that later antiquity treated as canonical for the instrument’s name. Catalogued under Olympian/rustic gods as a labeled Roman transmission of a Greek nature-divinity’s attribute myth.