Pandarus is a Trojan aristocrat who appears in stories about the Trojan War. In Homer's Iliad he is portrayed as an energetic and impetuous warrior, but in medieval literature he becomes a witty and licentious figure who facilitates the affair between Troilus and Cressida. In Shakespeare's play Troilus and Cressida he is portrayed as an aged degenerate and coward, who ends the play by telling the audience he will bequeth them his "diseases".
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In Homer's Iliad, Pandarus or Pandaros (Πάνδαρος) is a famous archer and the son of Lycaon. Pandarus, who fights on the side of Troy in the Trojan War, first appears in Book Two of the Iliad. In Book Four, he shoots Menelaus and wounds him with an arrow, sabotaging a truce that could potentially have led to the peaceful return of Helen of Troy. He is goaded into breaking the truce by the gods, who wish for the destruction of Troy. He then wounds Diomedes with an arrow and acts as Aeneas' charioteer. He is later killed by Diomedes, whose spear strikes him in the face, severing his tongue.
Pandarus is also the name of a companion of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid.
Pandarus is not to be confused with Pandareus.
Pandarus appears in Il Filostrato by Giovanni Boccaccio, in which he plays the role of a go-between in the relationship of his cousin Criseyde and the Trojan prince Troilus, the younger brother of Paris and Hector. Bocaccio himself derived the story from Le Roman De Troie, by 12th century poet Benoît de Sainte-Maure. This story is not part of classical Greek mythology. Both Pandarus and other characters in the medieval narrative who carry names from the Iliad are quite different from Homer's characters of the same name.
In Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem Troilus and Criseyde (1370), Pandarus plays the same role; though Chaucer's Pandarus is Criseyde's uncle, not her cousin. Chaucer's Pandarus is of special interest because he is constructed as an expert rhetorician, who uses dozens of proverbs and proverbial sayings to bring the lovers Troilus and Criseyde together. When his linguistic fireworks fail at the end of the story, the proverb and human rhetoric in general are questioned as reliable means of communication.[1]
William Shakespeare used the medieval story again in his play Troilus and Cressida (1609). Shakespeare's Pandarus is more of a bawd than Chaucer's, and he is a lecherous and degenerate individual.
The plot function of Pandarus in Chaucer's and especially Shakespeare's famous works has given rise to the English term to pander, meaning to further other people's illicit amours, and a pander (in later usage a panderer), a person who does this. The strong pejorative connotations of pander apparently come less from Chaucer's well-meaning young Pandarus than from Shakespeare's cynical uncle figure who concludes the play's epilogue by wishing upon the audience all his many diseases. A panderer is, specifically, a bawd — a male who arranges access to female sexual favors, the manager of prostitutes. Thus, in law, the charge of pandering is an accusation that an individual has sold the sexual services of another. The verb "to pander" is also used in a more general sense to suggest active or implict encouragement of someone's weaknesses.