HERMES
Hermes (Ἑρμῆς) · Roman Mercury
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THE STORY
Maia, eldest of the Pleiades, bore him to Zeus in a cave of Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Laid in swaddling-bands on a winnowing fan, the infant slipped out, walked to Pieria, and stole the cattle that Apollo was herding. From a tortoise shell he strung the first lyre, and when Apollo heard it he gave the cattle in exchange; later Hermes traded his shepherd's pipe for the golden wand Apollo had carried as a herdsman, and learned divination by pebbles besides. Zeus appointed him herald to himself and to the gods below. 1
Only one witness saw the cattle driven off: the old man Battus, whom Mercury bribed with a cow to keep silence. The god returned in another shape, offering a bull and a cow for word of the herd, and the old man promptly betrayed the secret he had been paid to keep. Mercury turned his perjured heart to stone — the touchstone, which betrays as it was betrayed. 2
When Zeus loved Io and Hera set hundred-eyed Argus to guard her in her heifer shape, it was Hermes who was sent to free her. Ovid has him pipe the watcher drowsy with the tale of Syrinx and strike off his nodding head; Apollodorus says he killed him with the cast of a stone. Either way the deed earned him his oldest title, Argeiphontes, slayer of Argus — and Hera set her watchman's eyes in the peacock's tail. 3
In Homer he is the runner of the gods' errands across every border. Binding on his immortal golden sandals and taking the wand with which he seals men's eyes in sleep, he carries Zeus' decree to Calypso that Odysseus must go free; on the road to Circe's house he presses the herb moly into Odysseus' hand; he guides old Priam unseen through the Achaean camp by night to ransom Hector's body; and at the last he herds the souls of the slain suitors, gibbering like bats, down past the streams of Oceanus to the meadow of asphodel. 4
Greece kept his presence at its thresholds. On the summit of Cyllene, the mountain of his birth, Pausanias found a ruined temple of Cyllenian Hermes with an image of juniper wood some eight feet high; and at Tanagra he saw sanctuaries of Hermes the Ram-bearer and Hermes the Champion. There they told how the god turned a plague from the city by carrying a ram around the walls — Calamis carved him so, ram on shoulders — and at his festival the most beautiful of the youths still made the circuit of the walls with a lamb across his own. 5
