“OLD” PAN AND “NEW” PAN IN MENANDER’S DYSKOLOS

Ippokratis Kantzios (University of South Florida)

Menander’s Dyskolos, written in 316, stands between the Classical perception of the god Pan and the new, more urbane understanding of the god and his realm of nature, belonging to the Hellenistic period. In a sense, the god occurs twice as a character in the play: once as the “new” Pan, introducing the action and hastening it to its conclusion; and once as “the Grouch” himself, an alter ego of the old Classical Pan.

Knemon the Grouch lives in rural Attica, next to a shrine of Pan, whose Classical role is the god of remote places. Just as the Classical Pan is a crusty, reclusive deity, who is approached with fear by human travelers, so Knemon is a bad-tempered recluse, feared by his neighbors. Pan’s only company is that of the chaste Nymphs, whom he guards; so Knemon is sequestered with his virgin daughter, whom he forbids to marry. The Classical Pan is half-man, half-animal in shape, reflecting his half-human, half-animalistic nature; Knemon, too, shuns human conversation (a mark, according to Aristotle, Pol.1253a 10-19, of the animal), and he even threatens to take a bite out of a servant.

The “new” Pan who presides over the action of the play is a very different personage: not a reclusive creature of the wild, but charming, benevolent and downright urbane. The passion he inspires in Sostratos for Knemon’s daughter is far from the brutal, furtive and expedient passion of a Classical Pan, but is, rather, chastely ordained toward civil marriage and the bearing of legitimate children for the community. This is the Pan of the Hellenistic countryside, which becomes a bucolic extension of the city and its civil refinements, as we see in art and literature. When Menander’s “new” Pan invites the city with its people and practices into his country shrine, he opens the way for a new sophisticated, romanticized and domesticated vision of himself and his wilderness. Only Knemon, the “old” Pan’s alter ego, refuses to join the communal celebration of middle class values that brings the play to an end.