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HERMES (Hymns 4, 18, and 29; also 19 to his son Pan
and 29 to Hestia)
The long, lacunose, and stylistically unusual Hymn No. 4 to
Hermes probably dates to the late 6 th or even early 5 th -century. Nevertheless
it provides much information about the Thief-god, worker
by night, etc. that assists us in interpreting the Odyssey. The god's
ingenuity in making things recalls Eumaeus' rustic skill — fashioning
leather shoes, for example (14.23—24): facility in handling
cowhide is a Hermetic craft (Hymn 4.49 and 124). Hermes' connection
with willow plants and their pliant branches, suitable for plaiting
or tying, is also important to beat in mind when reading
Odyssey, where willow trees are named (øtçai, paired with Persephone's
black poplars at 10.510) and when Odysseus uses osiers
(lÿgoi) to effect the escape of his surviving comrades from the
Cyclops' cave (9.427) and to haul the body of a giant stag he slew
on Circe's isle (10.166—169). The central action of cattle-theft parallels
the key element of the Cyclops episode of Book 9, where the
hero's escape with six of his sailors is, besides escape, theft of the
monster-shepherd's finest rams. 18
Although the rest of Hymn No. 18 tells us nothing we didn't
know already from the long No. 4, in the final hexameter of the
shorter poem Hermes is xarid3thj. This does is not mere redundancy
with the familiar epic d3thr [or -wr] ÑÀwn, “grantor of good
things", frequently attached to the youthful god, but rather refers to
gratification that his gifts bestow. He is thus source of emotional,
not just practical benefit, which allies his work with that esthetic
“joy" which Ègla2 ¿rga of Athena's or Hephaestus' crafts excite
in their viewers. That Maia's son is a connoisseur of pleasing sights
we know from that extended moment in the Odyssey (Book 5,
63—76) when he stops and stares at the beautiful scene on Calypso's
isle, a place so marvelous to see that the visitor from
Olympus stops to admire it; while he himself is “most pleasing" to
see when he appears as a young mortal man to old Priam and the
royal herald at Il. 24.347—348 and (immediately recognizable to
Odysseus) at Od. 10.277—279. We may, in fact, suspect that part
of Athena's amusement on Ithaca in Odyssey 13 as she teases
Odysseus is her borrowing of her brother's disguise when she presents
herself in the likeness of a “young man, overseer of flocks,
quite elegant, such as sons of noble lords are" and Odysseus is delighted
to see [her] (222—226).
When Hermes uses the aforementioned laurel fire-stick as fire-
-maker thus may also be appropriating some of Hephaestus' fire
(båh klyto‡ =Hcaåstoy, l. 115).
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