ABSTRACT
The term “panic” is rooted in the Greek word panikon – “sudden fear.” It derives from the name of the Greek god Pan, god of shepherds, flocks, and forests in Greek mythology. According to myth, the feral god (depicted as half-goat, half-man) would often hide in the bushes along a forest trail, and as travelers passed, frighten them by suddenly manifesting himself (Hoffman, 2013). Konstan (2006) explains that irrationality, or the absence of an identifiable cause, is a central characteristic of panic. For example, he cites (Elster, 1999, p. 313), who includes “[p]anics or phobias that lack cognitive support” in a list of “putatively irrational emotions.” While today panic is attributed to both groups and individuals, the ancient Greeks understood it as a collective response to a sudden indistinct threat. As Borgeaud (1988, pp. 88-89) concludes:
Panic is always irrational terror involving noise and confused disturbance that unexpectedly overtakes a military encampment, usually at night. Its suddenness, its immediacy, is stressed … Furthermore, there is a stress on the lack of any visible cause, a lack that leads to fantasy; the victims of panic are in the grip of imagination, which is to say, of their worst fears. Any noise is immediately taken as the enemy in full attack.
