Pan is defined, first and foremost, by two things. One, he is a god of nature and wild lands: he protects the shepherds and their flocks, while also offering hunters their bounty. He is found in the forests, the meadows and the grottos ; he is the spirit of the fields, the groves and the glens. He is the patron of Arcadia, the Greek region that gave birth to the “Arcadian myth”, this idea of a peaceful, beautiful, idealized pastoral region (though the real-life Arcadia was a very mountainous area of Greece deemed “primitive” and backwards by the other Greeks). Two, he has a very unique appearance among the gods, being half-human and half-goat. He is usually depicted as a bearded man with the legs (or whole lower body), horns and ears of a goat. If this description sounds familiar, it is because it also fits the entire species of supernatural beings known in Greek mythology as the satyrs. The satyrs, the goat-men, were thought of as the friends and companions of Pan. The closeness between the god Pan and the satyr species led to Pan, from a singular entity, evolving through time into a “multiplicity”. For example the late Greek author Nonnus wrote in his “Dionysiaca” that Pan had twelve children, identical to him and who were all also known as “Pan”. Now, this is a very late addition to the Greek poetic canon, and is doesn’t seem to have been a widespread belief – but Nonnus does rely on the fact that the satyrs as a whole were commonly known as “little Pans” (Paniskoi), to distinguish them from the “great Pan”, the god proper.