On the day he was born, Hermes invented the lyre, stole a herd of divine cattle, walked the cattle backwards to obscure the tracks, wove himself a pair of sandals from wicker to disguise his own footprints, killed two of the cattle in the first-ever animal sacrifice, returned to his crib, wrapped himself in swaddling clothes, and pretended to be a newborn infant when his furious elder brother Apollo arrived to confront him. He then lied to Apollo's face, claimed to know nothing about any cattle, and invoked his own small size and recent birth as evidence of his impossibility as a cattle thief. Apollo was not deceived. He dragged the infant Hermes before Zeus, who found the entire scene so amusing that he ordered the brothers to work it out between themselves. What followed was one of antiquity's most consequential transactions: Hermes gave Apollo the lyre he had invented, and Apollo gave Hermes the cattle, and from that exchange, the god who stole the musician's instrument became the official messenger of the gods, the patron of thieves, travelers, and orators, and the only Olympian who could move freely between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Background: The Homeric Hymn to Hermes and Its Unusual Tone
The primary source for Hermes' character as a trickster is the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, a poem of 580 lines composed approximately in the seventh century BCE and conventionally numbered as the fourth of the Homeric Hymns. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes has been considered one of the most important texts to understand the divine nature of Hermes and his relationship with other gods because it recounts the deeds of infant Hermes who is only one day old. The hymn's unusual feature is its tone: it is comic, deliberately so, deploying the trappings of heroic divine narrative — divine genealogy, impressive epithets, formal speeches — in the service of what is essentially a farce about a baby thief who argues with his older brother before their father, the king of the gods. Zeus laughs. Apollo grumbles but eventually concedes. Hermes gets away with it, and the world ends up with both the lyre and the cattle in approximately the right divine hands, though through an arrangement that reversed the original ownership of both.
In literary works of Archaic Greece, Hermes is depicted both as a protector and a trickster. In Homer's Iliad, Hermes is called "the bringer of good luck," "guide and guardian," and "excellent in all the tricks." In Hesiod's Works and Days, Hermes is depicted giving Pandora the gifts of lies, seductive words, and a dubious character. These attributions from texts outside the Hymn establish that Hermes' trickster qualities were not an invention of the Hymn's author but a recognized part of the god's character across the archaic Greek literary tradition, predating or contemporaneous with the Hymn and reflected across multiple independent sources.
The Day's Events: From Tortoise to Transaction
The Hymn structures the day of Hermes' birth as a series of rapid inventions and crimes whose interrelation is more complex than it initially appears. Hermes found a tortoise outside the cave of Mount Cyllene where he was born, and at once he gains endless delight and sees it as a good omen. Hermes at once realises the potential of the tortoise, and sees how it can be profitable and helpful when made into a lyre. He killed the tortoise, stretched ox-gut strings across the shell, and played it — becoming, in the act of playing, the inventor of the first stringed instrument, and singing, for the first time, a song about his own birth and about the origins of the gods. The detail that he sang a theogony at the moment of his first musical performance is not incidental: the lyre, from its invention, is the instrument through which divine genealogy and cosmic order are narrated.
The cattle theft that followed was motivated, the Hymn tells us, by Hermes' desire for meat — a startlingly mundane reason for a cosmically consequential crime. He goes to steal Apollo's cattle in the evening simply because he desires flesh. He drove fifty of Apollo's immortal cattle out of their pasture in Pieria, reversing their hoofprints to make them appear to walk backward, and wove wicker sandals to disguise his own footprints in the sand. After stealing the cows, he also produces fire, which is another example of his inventiveness. He butchered two of the cattle in the first documented animal sacrifice in Greek mythology, divided them into twelve portions representing the twelve Olympians, and ate — but could not bring himself to consume the divine flesh he had worked so hard to acquire. The sacrifice was real; the feast, as a meal for himself, failed. He returned to Cyllene, slipped back into his swaddling clothes, and feigned sleep.
| Act | What Hermes Did | What It Created or Established |
|---|---|---|
| Tortoise-lyre invention | Killed a tortoise; strung ox gut across its shell; played it and sang a theogony | First stringed instrument; first musical performance about divine origins |
| Cattle theft | Stole 50 divine cattle; reversed hoofprints; wove wicker sandals as disguise | First crime against the gods; established Hermes as patron of thieves |
| Animal sacrifice | Killed and divided two cattle into twelve portions for the twelve Olympians | First animal sacrifice in Greek mythology; established the 12-Olympian structure |
| Apollo confrontation | Lied to Apollo's face; invoked his infancy; argued before Zeus | Established Hermes as patron of orators and persuasive speech |
| Lyre-for-cattle exchange | Gave Apollo the lyre; received the cattle herd and later a golden staff | Hermes receives the caduceus and his role as messenger; Apollo receives his definitive instrument |
The Paradox of the Exchange: Who Owns What
The resolution of the theft through the exchange of the lyre for the cattle has attracted considerable scholarly attention because it produces a paradox that the Hymn appears to enjoy rather than resolve. After the exchange is made, the earlier, ambivalent character of the lyre reasserts itself. Hermes first plays the lyre, singing about his own famous birth — he plays the poet of his own origin. When Apollo first hears the sound of the lyre, his reaction is to insist on the absolute worth and originality of the instrument. But the lyre was invented by Hermes, who traded it away; now the instrument that was always going to define Apollo was created by the god who stole from him, and the cattle that were always going to define Hermes' pastoral associations were the ones he stole from their original divine owner. Now the defining "property" of each god is an original possession of the other.
Hermes literally and metaphorically steals from Apollo. He steals his cattle, but he also takes on his youthful appearance, and his epithet of the god of music. Brown cites evidence that musical cults of Apollo and Hermes were often in competition. The Hymn thus records not just a theft but a negotiated realignment of divine domains: Apollo gains the lyre and loses the cattle; Hermes gains the cattle and his place among the Olympians and loses the lyre; but having invented the lyre, having defined it through his own first performance, Hermes has marked it permanently as something he could have kept but chose to give. The gift is more valuable as a gift than it would have been as a possession, because giving it elevated Hermes from divine infant and criminal to recognized Olympian with negotiated standing — which was, the Hymn implies, the plan from the beginning of the day.
Hermes Among the Tricksters: The Most Institutionalized
Of all the tricksters examined in this series, Hermes is the most thoroughly absorbed into the divine establishment. Loki was never worshipped and exists primarily as a narrative engine. Anansi negotiated a purchase that gave him cosmic title to all stories but did not make him part of the divine court. Coyote operates at the margins of cosmic order in traditions where he is not explicitly a creator. Hermes, by contrast, ends the Hymn with a formal role — divine messenger, psychopomp, patron of commerce, thieves, and travelers — ratified by Zeus himself and made permanent in his iconography: the winged sandals, the winged traveler's hat, the caduceus staff with its intertwined serpents. In this hymn, Hermes is invoked as a god "of many shifts" (polytropos), associated with cunning and thievery, but also a bringer of dreams and a night guardian. He is said to have invented the chelys lyre, as well as racing and the sport of wrestling.
The word polytropos — "of many shifts," or "the one who turns many ways" — is the same epithet Homer applies to Odysseus at the opening of the Odyssey, and the connection is not accidental. Hermes and Odysseus share the same fundamental quality: a relationship to truth and lying that is more complex than simple dishonesty, in which the ability to construct and manipulate narrative serves not merely selfish ends but a broader social and cosmic function. Hermes lies to Apollo but does so with a verbal virtuosity that Zeus finds more impressive than condemnable. Odysseus lies to virtually everyone in the Odyssey but does so in service of his return home, his identity, and his household. Neither figure is a simple liar. Both are navigators of the gap between what is said and what is true, and that navigation requires a god to protect it — which is what Hermes, in his final institutionalized form, does.
Theories and Explanations
The scholarly framework most consistently applied to the Homeric Hymn to Hermes treats it as a narrative about the negotiation of divine domains and the establishment of Hermes' position within the Olympian hierarchy through transgression followed by exchange. The reason for stealing Apollo's cattle is because Hermes is eager to receive the same honour of Apollo, joining the assembly of gods on equal terms. Under this reading, the theft is not random mischief but a calculated strategy: Hermes is the youngest Olympian, son of a nymph rather than a Titaness or goddess, and he needs a way into the divine social structure that bypasses the status hierarchy he was born below. His trickery functions as a social mobility mechanism — the only route available to a newcomer who cannot compete through birth rank or established power.
A second framework, developed by Walter Burkert and other scholars of Greek religion, situates the Hermes of the Hymn within a broader pattern of divine "first inventor" myths, in which a boundary-crossing figure produces the foundational technologies of culture — fire, tools, music, sacrifice — through acts that simultaneously transgress existing order and establish new order. Hermes' day-one inventory (lyre, fire, sacrifice, reversible footprints, wicker sandals) reads, in this framework, not as arbitrary crime but as a systematic founding of the cultural institutions that divine patrons will subsequently protect. A third, more linguistically focused framework notes that Hermes' name may derive from the Greek word for stone heap (herma), the kind of boundary marker placed at crossroads and doorways, suggesting that his most ancient function — before the literary sophistication of the Hymn — was as the god of boundaries and thresholds, which is entirely consistent with his later roles as the only god who crosses freely between Olympus, earth, and the underworld.
The Curious Connection
Hermes closes the series' survey of four tricksters by completing the spectrum their comparison has revealed. Loki is the trickster who accumulates consequences until the world ends. Anansi is the trickster who wins formal cosmic title through cunning without accumulating anything negative. Coyote is the trickster who creates the conditions of existence and then finds himself subject to them. Hermes is the trickster who tricks his way into the establishment, receives official divine credentials, and spends the rest of Greek mythology as the system's most indispensable functionary — the being without whom no message can be delivered, no dream can arrive, no soul can cross from the living to the dead, no transaction can be completed.
This final transformation — trickster to messenger, thief to patron of all thievery, liar to protector of all persuasive speech — is the most socially functional of the four trickster outcomes this series has examined. Loki's story ends in catastrophe. Anansi's ends in ownership of something intangible. Coyote's ends in a mortality that applies to him too. Hermes' ends in a job. And the job he gets is specifically the job of moving between categories — between worlds, between gods and humans, between life and death — which is precisely the structural role that defines the trickster archetype in every tradition this series has covered. In Hermes, the trickster doesn't just fill the role that the cosmic order needs filled. He negotiates himself into permanent employment as the infrastructure through which everything else works — and the civilization that produced him built temples to that negotiation and called it wisdom.
FAQ
What is the Homeric Hymn to Hermes?
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is a 580-line Greek poem composed approximately in the seventh century BCE, the fourth of the major Homeric Hymns. It describes the events of Hermes' birth-day: the invention of the lyre, the theft of Apollo's cattle, the confrontation before Zeus, and the exchange of the lyre for the cattle and a formal divine role — establishing most of Hermes' major attributes through the narrative of a single extraordinary day.
Why did Hermes steal Apollo's cattle?
According to the Homeric Hymn, Hermes' immediate motivation was hunger — he wanted meat. But scholars have also identified a deeper strategic motivation: as the youngest Olympian, born to a nymph rather than a higher-ranking goddess, Hermes needed to force his way into the divine social order on equal terms. The theft, confrontation, and subsequent exchange gave him a negotiated standing he could not have achieved through conventional divine birth rank.
What happened when Hermes was caught?
Apollo dragged Hermes before Zeus, who found the entire situation so amusing that he ordered the brothers to resolve it themselves. Hermes gave Apollo the lyre he had invented, and Apollo gave Hermes the cattle herd. Apollo later also gave Hermes a golden staff, which became the caduceus. Zeus formalized Hermes' role as messenger of the gods, patron of thieves and travelers, and the guide of souls to the underworld.
What does polytropos mean and why is it applied to Hermes?
Polytropos means "of many shifts" or "turning many ways" in Greek, and it is applied to Hermes in the Homeric Hymn to emphasize his fundamental quality of multidirectional adaptability — the ability to operate in multiple registers simultaneously, to be cunning and eloquent and deceptive all at once. The same epithet is applied to Odysseus at the opening of the Odyssey, reflecting a Greek cultural value placed on complex, adaptive intelligence over straightforward strength or virtue.
Why is Hermes the only god who can travel to the underworld and return?
Hermes' role as psychopomp — guide of souls — and his freedom to cross between the world of the living and the dead derives from his fundamental nature as a boundary-crosser. His most ancient association may be with hermai, stone heaps placed at thresholds and crossroads, which would make his movement between realms an expression of his deepest identity: the god of the threshold who is at home in the passage between states rather than in any single one.