Excerpta Vaticana (9-11)

It is said about him that, after seeing his own reflection in water and falling in love with it, Narcissus leapt into the water to embrace his reflection, and drowned. This is not true. He drowned not in water, but in this way: having seen his own image in the fluid nature of his physical body, that is, his corporeal existence, which is the image most distant from the true soul, and conceiving a desire to embrace this as a part of himself, that is to say, falling in love with life according to this image, he drowned, submerged, having destroyed his true soul, that is to say the life that truly belongs to it—as the saying goes: fearful of his own shadow. This teaches us to be wary of enthusiasm for the most distant thing as if it were the most important thing because this brings about the death of the soul, that is, the destruction of true judgement about things and of the appropriate perfection in it in accordance with reality. So says the author of Proverbial expressions in Plato.

One should know that Alexander, or Paris, did not judge the goddesses but, being clever, he composed an encomium on them. This gave rise to the myth that he decided a contest between Pallas, Hera, and Aphrodite.

Polyaenus, in his Stratagems [1.2], says that Pan was the first to invent a military formation and that he named it a ‘phalanx’. He arranged the wings [lit. ‘horns’] on the right and left, and so they depict him with horns. Furthermore, he was the first to instil fear in enemy forces, using cunning skill. After learning from sentries that a great force of enemy soldiers was attacking him, Dionysus was terrified. Pan, however, was not afraid: by night he signalled to Dionysus’ army to raise a great war cry. They sounded the trumpet and yelled, and the rocks and valleys echoed it back. Stricken with fear, the enemy fled. And so, honouring Pan’s stratagem, we sing of his beloved Echo, and call the empty, night-time fears of armies ‘panics’.