Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other companions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer’s path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd’s pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.
ATTRIBUTION:
Walter Pater (1839–1894), British writer, educator. originally published in Fortnightly Review (Dec. 1876). “A Study of Dionysus,” pp. 7-8, repr. In Greek Studies: A Series of Essays, Macmillan (1895).
Posthumously prepared for the press by Charles L. Shadwell.
