Hermes in Greek Mythology: Messenger God and Trickster

Hermes is the Greek messenger god: patron of travelers, heralds, merchants, shepherds and thieves, and the guide who leads the souls of the dead to the underworld. He is the son of Zeus and the nymph Maia, the Roman Mercury, and one of the twelve Olympians. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes says that on the day he was born he invented the lyre and stole fifty of Apollo's cattle, and by the next morning he was lying about it to Zeus's face.

Hermes quick facts

What is Hermes the god of?

Hermes is the god of crossings. Almost everything he looks after involves movement: roads and travelers, messages between gods and humans, buying and selling, a lucky find on the way, flocks moving between pastures, and the soul passing from life to death. Thieves belong to him too.

His oldest image in Greece was the herm, a square stone pillar topped with a bearded head and carved with male genitals, set up at doorways, crossroads and boundaries. Thucydides describes how, one night in 415 BC, most of the herms in Athens had their faces mutilated just as the city's fleet was about to sail for Sicily. The Athenians treated it as a plot against the state.

What did Hermes do on the day he was born?

In the comic Homeric Hymn to Hermes, his whole personality shows up in his first two days. Born at dawn in Maia's cave, the baby climbs out of his cradle and finds a tortoise at the door. He stretches strings across its shell and invents the lyre. By evening he has crossed Greece to Pieria and stolen fifty cows from his half-brother Apollo. To hide the trail he drives them backwards and ties bundles of twigs to his own feet as makeshift sandals. He invents fire-making with sticks, sacrifices two of the cows, then slips home through the keyhole like a mist and curls up in his blankets.

Apollo tracks him down, and Hermes swears he is a newborn who knows nothing about cows. Zeus laughs but orders him to hand back the herd. The quarrel ends in a deal: Hermes plays the lyre, Apollo is enchanted, and the lyre goes to Apollo in exchange for the cattle and the role of herdsman. Hermes promptly invents the shepherd's panpipes, and Apollo gives him a golden staff.

What are Hermes's powers?

• Speed. In the Odyssey and the Iliad, he ties on golden sandals that carry him over sea and land as fast as the wind.
• Sleep and waking. The same passages give him a wand that closes human eyes in sleep or wakes the sleeping.
• Stealth and theft. He opens locked doors, moves unseen and steals from gods. In Iliad Book 5 he quietly frees Ares from a bronze jar where two giants had imprisoned him. In Apollodorus' Library he steals back Zeus's severed sinews from the monster Typhon, and in the war against the giants he wears the cap of invisibility that belongs to Hades.
• Guide of souls. As Psychopompos he crosses freely between Olympus, earth and the dead. In Odyssey Book 24 he rouses the ghosts of the slain suitors with his golden wand and leads them, squeaking like bats, down to the meadow of asphodel.

For how these gifts compare with the other Olympians, see Greek gods and their powers.

Why is Hermes the messenger of the gods?

Because he can go anywhere and talk anyone round, though Homer divides the job. In the Iliad the regular messenger is the rainbow goddess Iris, and Hermes acts mainly as a guide, leading old King Priam through the Greek camp at night to ransom Hector's body from Achilles. In the Odyssey, Hermes is the messenger: he flies to the nymph Calypso to order her to release Odysseus, and he gives Odysseus the magic herb moly to protect him from Circe's spells.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, when Demeter's grief has stopped all crops from growing, Zeus sends Hermes down to the underworld to persuade Hades to release Persephone.

He also helps heroes. In Apollodorus, he and Athena guide Perseus on his way to Medusa and Hermes gives him an unbreakable sickle; the winged sandals come from nymphs, not Hermes. He also carries the infant Dionysus to safety, a scene Pausanias saw carved by Praxiteles at Olympia.

In Hesiod's Works and Days, Hermes gives Pandora, the first woman, a lying tongue and a thievish nature, names her, and delivers her to Epimetheus.

How did Hermes kill Argus?

Zeus fell in love with Io, a priestess of Hera, and turned her into a cow to hide her. Hera demanded the cow as a gift and set the giant Argus, whose body was covered with eyes, to guard her. Zeus sent Hermes to free her, and the deed gave Hermes his title Argeiphontes.

The sources disagree on how. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Mercury, disguised as a shepherd, plays reed pipes and tells the story of the nymph Syrinx until every one of Argus's hundred eyes closes, then cuts off his head. Juno sets the dead giant's eyes in the tail of her peacock. In Apollodorus, Hermes simply kills Argus with a thrown stone.

Who are Hermes's children?

Autolycus shows how genealogies grew. In Odyssey Book 19 he is Odysseus's grandfather, a master of theft and tricky oaths, and Hermes is merely his patron. Later genealogies turn the patron into a father, and Ovid even names the mother, Chione, which makes Hermes the great-grandfather of Odysseus.

Is the caduceus a medical symbol?

Not originally. The caduceus is Hermes's herald's staff, the sign of a messenger who must be allowed to pass safely. The Roman writer Hyginus, in his work on astronomy, explains the snakes with a story: Mercury laid his staff between two fighting serpents, they stopped fighting, and the staff with twined snakes became a sign of peace.

The true symbol of medicine is the rod of Asclepius, a plain staff with a single snake. The US Army's medical department adopted the caduceus in the early 20th century, which is why it still appears on many American medical logos.

How is Hermes different from Mercury?

Mercury was the Roman god of merchants, who inherited Hermes's myths, sandals and staff. Romans also saw him in foreign gods: Julius Caesar wrote that the Gauls honored Mercury above all others, and Tacitus said the same of the Germans, whose god most historians identify with Woden, the Norse Odin. That is why Wednesday, Woden's day, translates the Roman dies Mercurii, which survives in French mercredi.

In the sources

• Homeric Hymn to Hermes — his birth, the lyre, the cattle theft, his deal with Apollo.
• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey — guide of Priam, messenger to Calypso, the moly, the suitors' souls, the joke about Aphrodite and Ares.
• Hesiod, Theogony (his birth to Zeus and Maia) and Works and Days (Pandora).
• Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Homeric Hymn to Pan.
• Sophocles, Trackers — a fragmentary satyr play about the cattle theft.
• Herodotus; Thucydides (the herms); Apollodorus, Library; Pausanias; Ovid, Metamorphoses; Hyginus.

Where the sources disagree:

• The lyre and the cattle. In the Hymn, Hermes builds the lyre first, before the theft. Apollodorus reverses the order: he steals and sacrifices the cows, then finds the tortoise and strings his lyre with gut from the very cattle he slaughtered. Apollodorus also puts the disguising shoes on the cows' hooves rather than on Hermes.
• Argus. Lulled to sleep and beheaded (Ovid) or felled with a stone (Apollodorus).
• Pan's mother. A daughter of Dryops (the Hymn to Pan) or Penelope, the wife of Odysseus (Herodotus).
• Autolycus. Hermes's favorite in the Odyssey, his son in later writers such as Ovid.

In popular culture

• Disney's Hercules (1997). Hermes is a wisecracking messenger voiced by Paul Shaffer, close in tone to the Homeric Hymn, even if the film's family tree is not.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Rick Riordan makes Hermes the father of Luke Castellan, the series' tragic antagonist, and gives him a cabin full of thieves and stray campers. Lin-Manuel Miranda played him in the Disney+ series.
• God of War III (2010). Kratos kills Hermes and takes his boots, a nod to the golden sandals; no ancient myth kills him.
• Hades (Supergiant Games, 2020). Hermes offers boons of speed and quick reflexes, a direct translation of his Odyssey sandals.
• Lore Olympus. Rachel Smythe's webcomic makes Hermes a cheerful friend of Persephone, fitting a god who moves easily between Olympus and the underworld.

Keep exploring

See the god he rescued in Ares in Greek mythology, the goddess he joked about in Aphrodite, and the brother he robbed in Apollo. Compare the whole pantheon in Greek gods and their powers, place him on the Greek gods family tree, or take the Which Greek god are you? quiz.