On the day Hermes was born, he climbed out of his cradle, walked to the nearby fields, stole fifty cattle from his brother Apollo, and drove them backwards through the countryside to confuse anyone who tried to follow their tracks. Then he went home, climbed back into the cradle, and pretended to be asleep when Apollo came looking for his herd.
This is the story the Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells about the first day of one of the most important gods in the Greek pantheon. He is hours old, already a thief, already a liar, already capable of a level of logistical cunning that most adults could not manage. When Apollo drags him before Zeus to account for himself, Hermes denies everything with such cheerful confidence that Zeus laughs out loud. The cattle are returned. Apollo and Hermes are reconciled. Apollo gives Hermes his golden staff in exchange for the lyre Hermes has invented by that morning from a tortoiseshell. Hermes goes on to become the messenger of the gods, the guide of souls to the underworld, the patron of travellers and merchants and athletes and orators and, explicitly, thieves.
The combination is not accidental and it is not a contradiction. It is the most precise possible description of what Hermes actually is: the god of boundaries and their crossing, of the moment when something moves from one state or place to another, of every transaction in which something passes from one party to another and the outcome is not yet certain. Messages, money, souls, cattle: they all move. Hermes governs the movement.
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Who He Was
Hermes was the son of Zeus and Maia, one of the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas and the nymph Pleione. He was born in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, which gave him one of his epithets, the Cyllenian. His Roman equivalent was Mercury, and the identification was so close that Roman writers used both names without distinction. The planet Mercury, the element mercury, the word mercurial, and the medical symbol of the caduceus all derive from his tradition, though the last of these involves a confusion: the caduceus is Hermes’s herald’s staff and is associated with commerce and negotiation, not with medicine. The staff associated with medicine is the rod of Asclepius, which has a single serpent rather than two. The confusion has been persistent enough that the American military medical corps adopted the caduceus in the 19th century and has used it ever since.
He is one of the twelve Olympians and among the most frequently appearing gods in Greek mythology, which reflects his function: every time something needs to move between the divine and mortal worlds, between Olympus and the underworld, between one party and another, Hermes is the mechanism by which it moves. He is less a character with a fixed personality than a principle given divine form, and the personality the tradition gives him, clever, cheerful, quick, entirely comfortable with deception when it serves a legitimate purpose, is precisely suited to the function.
The Paradox of the Trustworthy Trickster
The apparent contradiction between Hermes as divine messenger, the one god entrusted with communications that cannot be altered or falsified, and Hermes as patron of thieves and liars, is the most interesting thing about him and the thing that most popular treatments of the god miss or sidestep.
The resolution is in understanding what kind of crossing Hermes governs. A divine message must be delivered accurately: the message is what it is and cannot be changed in transit, which is why Zeus trusts Hermes to carry it rather than anyone else. But the delivery of that message involves moving through every boundary between the sender and the recipient: from Olympus to earth, from the divine world to the human one, from the formality of divine decree to the immediate reality of whoever is receiving the news. Hermes navigates those boundaries because he is constitutionally suited to existing in the spaces between things, which is also precisely the skill that a good thief requires.
The thief operates in the boundary between what is yours and what is mine. The merchant operates in the moment of transaction when ownership is in flux. The orator operates at the boundary between his own position and his audience’s resistance to it. The soul guide operates at the boundary between life and death. All of these are the same kind of operation, and all of them require the same quality: comfort with ambiguity, skill at transition, and the ability to move between states without being captured by any of them.
Hermes is trustworthy not despite being the patron of thieves but because both qualities express the same underlying nature. He can be trusted with messages because he understands the value of accurate transmission. He patronises thieves because he understands the skill of operating at the edges of ownership. Both involve a precise relationship to boundaries, and boundaries are what he is made of.
The Caduceus and the Herms
Hermes’s two most recognisable symbols are the caduceus and the winged sandals, but his most widespread presence in ancient Greece was neither of these. It was the herm: a square stone pillar topped with a head of Hermes and, on the front, a phallus. Herms were placed at crossroads, doorways, property boundaries, and the entrances to gymnasia and public spaces throughout the Greek world. They served as boundary markers, as good luck charms for travellers, and as religious objects protecting the spaces they stood at.
The importance of herms to Athenian civic and religious life was demonstrated dramatically in 415 BC, the night before the Athenian fleet was due to depart for the Sicilian Expedition, one of the largest military operations in Athenian history. Someone, or a group of someones, went through Athens that night and systematically mutilated the herms: knocking off or defacing the faces on hundreds of the pillars simultaneously. The vandalism caused a political crisis that shook the city to its foundations. The expedition was delayed while an investigation was conducted. Accusations flew in every direction. Alcibiades, the flamboyant general who was one of the expedition’s commanders, was accused and eventually recalled from Sicily to face trial, though he fled into exile instead. The Sicilian Expedition ended in one of the worst military disasters in Athenian history.
Whether the mutilation of the herms caused the disaster or simply preceded it is not a question the historical record can answer. What the incident demonstrates is how seriously Athenians took the herms and the god they represented. Vandalising a boundary marker was not simply vandalism. It was an attack on the divine protection of the city’s edges, on the sacred principle of safe passage, and on the god who guaranteed that transactions and movements and communications could be trusted. The political panic that followed was proportionate to what the Athenians understood they had lost.
His Role in the Odyssey
Hermes appears twice in the Odyssey in ways that directly shape the plot. His first intervention is the delivery of the moly herb to Odysseus before he enters Circe’s palace. The moly, with its black root and white flower, is the counter to Circe’s pharmaka that allows Odysseus to resist her transformation spell. Hermes does not give Odysseus detailed instructions for how to handle Circe or what the subsequent year on her island will look like. He gives him one specific tool and explains how to use it, then leaves. The rest is Odysseus’s problem to manage with what he has been given, which is consistent with how Hermes generally operates: he enables passage without guaranteeing the outcome.
His second major appearance is the embassy to Calypso’s island, Ogygia. Zeus decides that Odysseus must be released and sends Hermes to deliver the message to Calypso. The journey itself is described in detail that Homer rarely gives to divine travel: Hermes puts on his winged sandals, takes up his staff, and flies across the sea, skimming the waves like a seabird. He finds Calypso in her cave weaving and singing, surrounded by the pleasant landscape of her island. He delivers the message. He does not stay. He does not comfort Calypso or acknowledge that the message will cause her genuine grief. He delivers what he has been sent to deliver and leaves, which is his function and also, in this context, his limitation. He can carry the message. He cannot make it easier to receive.
In the final books of the Odyssey, after the suitors have been killed, Hermes appears in his psychopomp role to lead their shades to the underworld. The transition from the main action of the poem to this brief, melancholy episode is one of the quieter moments in Homer: Hermes gathers the dead and leads them through the world to their final destination, performing the service he performs for every human soul, without distinction between the deserving and the otherwise.
The Homeric Hymn: His Origin Story
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is one of the longest and most narratively developed of the Homeric Hymns, and it is the primary source for the story of his birth and the cattle theft. It is also one of the funniest texts in ancient Greek literature, which is not something that gets said about religious hymns very often.
The theft itself is logistically impressive for an infant. Hermes drives the cattle backwards so their tracks lead in the wrong direction. He ties brushwood to his feet to obscure his own footprints. He improvises sandals from tamarisk and myrtle. He invents the lyre on the way home, killing a tortoise and stretching seven strings of sheep gut across the shell. By the time Apollo finds him, he is back in his cradle wrapped in swaddling clothes, looking innocent.
The confrontation before Zeus is rendered as a kind of divine comedy: Apollo, the god of truth and prophecy, presenting his case against an infant who simply denies everything. Zeus cannot rule directly against his son but cannot let the theft stand either. The resolution, Apollo giving Hermes the golden caduceus in exchange for the lyre, produces the two defining symbols of Hermes’s divine identity from a single day’s negotiation between two brothers who will eventually become close allies.
The hymn establishes something important about Hermes that the Odyssey confirms: he is the god who operates through charm and cleverness rather than through force or divine authority. He does not command. He negotiates, persuades, enables, and moves. Even when he is delivering a direct order from Zeus, as he does with Calypso, the delivery has a lightness to it that suggests the message is being carried rather than enforced. He is always the messenger, never the author, and the distinction matters to him.
The Psychopomp: Guide of the Dead
Hermes’s role as psychopomp, the guide of souls to the underworld, gives him a dimension that his trickster and messenger roles do not immediately suggest. The guide of the dead must be absolutely trustworthy in a way that leaves no room for cleverness or deception: the soul being led has no defences, no ability to negotiate, no resources to fall back on. It has to follow, and the god leading it has to be reliably going where it needs to go.
This is why the same god who stole cattle at birth and patronises thieves is also the one entrusted with the most vulnerable transition any being undergoes. Hermes can be trusted at the boundary between life and death precisely because he understands boundaries completely. He knows what it means to cross from one state to another. He knows the space between, where the soul is in transit and has not yet arrived. He has been operating in those spaces since the day he was born.
In some accounts he also has a role in bringing souls back from the underworld, escorting Persephone on her annual return to the living world and, in the myth of Eurydice, accompanying Orpheus and his newly recovered wife on the journey upward until the moment Orpheus looks back and loses her again. Hermes is present at both directions of the transition, which is the most complete possible expression of what a boundary deity actually is: not fixed at the line itself but able to move freely on either side of it.
Robert Pattinson and the 2026 Film
In Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, Robert Pattinson plays Hermes. The casting is interesting because Pattinson has built a career playing figures who are simultaneously charming and slightly uncanny, attractive in a way that carries an edge of wrongness, which is not an inaccurate description of what Hermes is in the tradition. The god who can go anywhere and be trusted by everyone is also the god of thieves, and the two qualities share a face.
How Nolan’s film uses Hermes depends on how much weight it gives to the divine machinery of the Odyssey. If the film follows the poem closely, Hermes appears twice: delivering the moly to Odysseus and the command to Calypso. If Nolan expands the divine framework, there is considerably more to work with in the tradition. Hermes leading the suitors’ shades to the underworld at the poem’s end would be a natural visual opportunity for a director with Nolan’s interest in transition and threshold.
Further Reading
If this article sparked your interest, these are the books worth reading next.
The Iliad — Homer (Penguin Classics)
by Homer — the primary source for everything in this article, and still the most vivid account of the Trojan War ever written.
The Odyssey — Homer (Emily Wilson translation)
by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson — the best modern English translation, and the book that contains Odysseus’s own account of the horse.
The Trojan War: A Very Short Introduction
by Eric Cline — the clearest and most up to date account of what archaeology actually tells us about Troy and whether any of it happened.
For more on the Greek tradition, the Zeus article covers the father whose messages Hermes carries. The Hades article covers the underworld Hermes escorts the dead to. The Persephone article covers the figure Zeus sends Hermes to retrieve from the underworld. The Orpheus and Eurydice article covers another descent into the underworld that Hermes is involved in. The Prometheus article covers the Titan Hermes visits to demand the prophetic knowledge Zeus wants. The Greek Mythology hub page has every article in the cluster.
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