A busy guy! Messenger of the gods, leader of the dead to the underworld, protector of flocks, patron of orators, guide of heralds, god of travellers, god of merchants, god of thieves, god of quick money (want to win the lottery? Ask Hermes for help!)

Roman Name: Mercury Sacred Region: Arcadia, a lush pastoral district Totem Animals: Goats and sheep; anything requiring a shepherd How to Identify Him: Winged or broad hat and sandals, caduceus, and sometimes a bag of money. Like Apollo, Hermes is often portrayed in sculptures without a beard to show his status as a younger-generation Olympian.   Hermes has no sacred plant (perhaps because plants are rooted in one place?) and he is not married (perhaps for a similar reason). The Greek author Pausanias associates him with a particular wild strawberry tree in Tanagra, in northern Greece, where the baby Hermes was nurtured, but that isn't the same thing as a general association with a type of plant. Me, I'd like to know what a strawberry tree is: I can hardly get my strawberry plants to grow higher than my ankles!

 
Of all the Olympian deities, Hermes is the most active. Maybe that's why he always seems to be running from one place to another. In one or another of his many roles, he appears in more myths than any other god in the classical pantheon.

Hermes is probably the most familiar of the classical gods in today's iconography as well, since we are so used to the Hermes/Mercury image that is the FTD florist symbol, according to their website "one of the most recognized logos in the world." In the FTD version, he carries a bouquet of flowers instead of a caduceus. Some things never change: I've often wondered how many such bouquets Zeus must have dispatched him with to various young maidens... and how many he had to deliver to Hera afterwards in an attempt to placate her.

As our textbook points out, Hermes is associated with movement and change. If we call someone mercurial, we mean subject to quick mood changes. An example is Mercutio in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, who is fatally hot-tempered but also so irrepressibly cheerful he can crack bad puns as he is dying. Just like Mercury, Mercutio moves from one role to another with startling ease. The planet Mercury zips across the sky much faster than other celestial bodies and rotates around the sun every 88 days, as opposed to Earth's 365. Even the element mercury took its name because it's so volatile. It is also known as "quicksilver," which would be an appropriate epithet for the god himself.

Nowadays, when we associate the idea of a fast-paced life--not to mention the idea of quick money--with the hustle and bustle of urban society, it may seem ironic that this busiest of Olympic gods is the patron of the pastoral way of life, the protector of shepherds' flocks. It's stately Athene who is associated with the city, and Father Zeus with the maintenance of society's laws in general. Poor Hermes, though, always seems to be running herd on something. Sometimes literally! No wonder he has to wield that caduceus, or kerukhion, as it's called in Greek.

The satirist Lucian, writing in the second century A.D., composed several of his humorous dialogues around Hermes, such as the one in which the god complains to his mother, the nymph Maia, that he is overworked:

I have so many jobs I can't keep them straight. I have to get up at the crack of dawn, clean up the banquet hall, straighten the cushions, put everything in order; then I have to go on duty with Zeus and play dispatch rider, delivering messages up here and down below. The minute I'm back, before I can wash the dust off, I'm serving the ambrosia. Until that new cupbearer [Ganymede] came I even had to take care of the nectar. Worst of all, I'm the only one who doesn't go to bed at night. That's when I have to be shade leader and herd the dead for Pluto [Hades] and act as court clerk at the judgment seat. It isn't enough that I work all day long in the gymnasiums, the political assemblies, and the public-speaking classes; no, I've got to split my time and help out with the dead too.... The sons of Alcmena and Semele [that is, Heracles and Dionysus]--miserable mortal women--sit at our banquets without a worry in the world, and who waits on them? I--the son of Maia, the grandson of Atlas! Here I am, just back from Sidon where he sent me to see how Europa was getting along, and, without giving me time to catch my breath, he's sending me off to Argos to look Danaë over.... I tell you, I'm fed up.

--trans. Lionel Casson

He even does an occasional turn as tour guide, as in another Lucianic dialogue where the recently deceased philosopher Menippus demands that he point out all the sights! As you may recall from Week Two, Hermes had to do this same kind of tour guide duty for Charon himself, when Lucian described that character's rare visit to the upper world.

Hermes might have even more reason to complain today, when the commercial appeal of his name, handed down from the days when he was the patron of merchants and salesmen, has resulted in its being slapped on everything from handbags to scarves to soap.

Sometimes Hermes appears as more of a bystander than an active participant, as in the story of Baucis and Philemon. At other times, he takes a more active role. In the famous statue by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles, which is in the upper right hand corner of this web page, Hermes is pictured holding the baby Dionysus. As we have already discussed in class, Dionysus was born out of Zeus's thigh. Hermes was present at the birth, and in some accounts he even acted as midwife. Afterwards he smuggled the infant off of Mount Olympus to avoid the consequences of Hera's wrath... at least for a while.

Hermes assists at the birth of Dionysus

Dionysus wasn't the only baby he saved. Some versions of the story of Asclepius say that it was Hermes who snatched the child from the fire and saved his life when Apollo zapped Coronis, Asclepius's mother.

Hermes is often a combination of fairy godfather and security guard. In the Iliad, he's the one who accompanies King Priam of the Trojans on his embassy to the Greek hero Achilles so he can ransom Hector's body--a healing moment for both Priam and Achilles, as each one is finally able to see the enemy as a suffering human being. In the Odyssey, it is Hermes who gives Odysseus the magic herb that serves as protection against the witch Circe's spells and enables the hero to avoid the swinish fate of his shipmates, whom she has turned into pigs. In the third great classical epic, Vergil's Aeneid, Hermes appears to Aeneas in Carthage to remind him of his destiny and set him back on the correct course of action.

Hermes isn't always helpful, as we saw in the story about his theft of Apollo's cattle. Don't you love the part where he actually leads the herd backwards so his tracks point in the wrong direction? But I think my favorite part is line 373, where the exasperated Apollo describes baby Hermes as heading for home, "playing with fire here and there on the way," just like a naughty child playing with matches.

This story not only shows us just what a tricky character Hermes is, but also explains the origin of Apollo's ever-present lyre. Notice that according to the "Hymn to Hermes" Hermes not only invents the lyre, but also the way to kindle a fire by friction as opposed to having to wait for a forest fire or a strike from Zeus's lightning (line 112). He even invents the correct method of sacrificing to the gods: he cuts the cattle into twelve pieces, eats one portion, and burns the rest. The twelve portions are for the twelve great Olympians--counting himself as the twelfth!

As you read at the end of the hymn, Hermes and Apollo were reconciled after that shaky start to their relationship, and Hermes went on to invent the flute. Not all stories agree with that conclusion, as the invention of the flute has also been claimed for Pan and for Athene. Other myths claim that Hermes kept the flute for his own, as it is the official instrument of the shepherd--and the method he used to put Hera's watchman Argos to sleep and rescue poor, bovine Io--but others claim that he gave that to Apollo as well. In return, Apollo gave him the herd of sacred cattle, and the caduceus as a sort of divine cattle prod. It's likely that it's through association with Apollo that the caduceus eventually became an attribute of both Hermes and Asclepius, though the number of snakes and general appearance is different.

Carrying the caduceus with him, Hermes brings sleep to people's eyes and leads those who have fallen asleep forever down to Hades' underworld, which is why he is sometimes called psychopompos (please, no jokes about "pompous psychos"!). "Psyche" means "soul," or "breath." The double meaning makes sense because when we stop breathing, our soul leaves our bodies...and vice versa.

Hermes' ability to move between the two worlds made him a patron of translations and of articulate speech, because one should know how to talk in both places. Needless to say, the ability to speak multiple languages is also of great use to merchants and anyone who travels a lot. Professional speakers were careful not to offend him, too, or he might mix their words.

In the Hellenistic period Hermes got connected with the Egyptian god Thoth and he became Hermes Trismegistus, that is, thrice great (on the Rosseta Stone he appears as "Hermes the Great Great Great," so be thankful for shortcuts). He was thought to be the author of the 42 books of the Egyptian religion, which include volumes on cosmological, astrological, and philosophical knowledge. This new connection gave him yet another role: the protector of magicians.

And after all that, he still had time for romance. Among his children, the goat-footed god Pan is the most popular, but the story of his son by Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, has a certain bizarre fascination. It's from the myth of Hermaphroditus that we get our word "hermaphrodite." He wasn't born that way, but became both male and female when he was forced to merge with a nymph whose love he had rejected. I think it's pretty funny that one of Aphrodite's own sons tried to turn away from sexual passion!

The exception to the youthful, beardless Hermes is the Hermes portrayed on the household herms, as pictured in our textbook. A herm is a quadrangular pillar with a older, bearded Hermes' head, a phallus for good luck, and a tenos on which worshippers put offerings. Herms were placed near houses in the city as protection against thieves; apparently Hermes was an equal opportunity protector who shielded people from thieves even as he shielded the thieves themselves. This tradition continued for long after the classical period, as evidenced by the example to the left, which is dated c. 141-142 A.D.

The herms were the center of an enormous controversy that just possibly brought about the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War and very probably brought about Socrates' execution. In 415 B.C., Socrates' pupil Alcibiades was put on trial for multilating Athens' Herms just before a critical military expedition--a horrific offense because the bad luck it could bring would be likely to result in defeat. Alcibiades was forced to flee for his life and wound up going over to the enemy side.

Three stones on top of each other would be enough to serve as a boundary marker or create a makeshift Herm for a traveller on the road. For this reason, during the Roman occupation of ancient Israel it was against Jewish law to place three stones in that formation; it was considered a sign of illicit worship of Mercury, the Roman name for Hermes.