Ancient Greek god. Hermes, son of Zeus and Maia, appears in many contexts. A prominent aspect of his nature is that of the shepherd-god. Music has an assured place among his activities, thanks largely to the first of two Homeric hymns (iv and xviii) in his honour. In its 580 lines, it portrays a startlingly precocious new-born Hermes who killed a mountain tortoise (chelus, a name that came to designate the lyra proper) and used its carapace for the sound-chest of the first lyra. He thereupon stole the cattle of his brother Apollo. Compelled by Zeus to reveal the theft, he made amends by presenting Apollo with the lyra.
It was inevitable that Hermes should have been credited with devising the syrinx (panpipes), in view of his pastoral attributes. More surprising is his association with the double aulos: a vase painting shows him playing the instrument, and he seems to have been among the many whom Greek writers named as its inventor. All these attributions are probably due to the outstanding cleverness which regularly characterized his portrayal in myth, and which made him a natural choice as the discoverer of many arts and devices, including astronomy, the alphabet and even music. It was only as an inventor, however, that Hermes had any noteworthy connection with the musical culture of Greece.
The Roman god Mercury may possibly have developed in part out of the figure of Hermes.
N.O. Brown: Hermes the Thief: the Evolution of a Myth (Madison, WI, 1947/R)
J.D. Beazley: ‘Hymn to Hermes’, American Journal of Archaeology, lii (1948), 336–40
M. Wegner: Das Musikleben der Griechen (Berlin, 1949), 16–17, 205
J. Duchemin: La houlette et la lyre, i: Hermès et Apollon (Paris, 1960)
M. Kaimio: ‘Music in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes’, Arctos: Acta philologica fennica, viii (1974), 29–42
W. Burkert: Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart, 1977; Eng. trans., 1985)
L. Kahn-Lyotard: ‘Hermes’, Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique, ed. Y. Bonnefoy (Paris, 1981), i, 500–04
T. Hägg: ‘Hermes and the Invention of the Lyre: an Unorthodox Version’, Symbolae osloensis, lxiv (1989), 36–73
W.D. Anderson: Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 54–6
For further bibliography see Greece, §I.
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN