Gods, Myths and Heroes - Part 19a

 Hermes/Mercury

The Greek god Hermes, called Mercury by the Romans, was best known as the messenger of the gods, which we will look at tomorrow.  Today, we examine the older origins of Hermes in ancient Greece as a phallic god of boundaries.  In the 6th century BC, the Athenian ruler Hipparchus marked the boundaries between the Athenian city-state's subdivisions by erecting boundary stones called herms, such as the one above, c. 520 BC.  Each herm was a rectangular stone capped by a bust of the god Hermes.

Here's a bronze herm that dates from c. 490 BC.  As you see, there was also a phallus on each herm.  This was not ancient Greek porn.  The phallus was considered to have powers to ward off evil.  For this reason, herms were also placed outside houses for good luck.

This pottery vessel in the Louvre shows a side view of a herm, c. 475-450 B.C.

Eventually, herms were made with heads other than the god Hermes.  This one, made by Polyeuktos in 280 BC, has the head of Demosthenes.  But it still has the traditional male genitals for good luck.

This herm featuring the head of the god Dionysos was made in the 2nd century BC and was recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Tunisia.

This herm is in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.  I don't know when it was made or who it represented.

As time passed, the form of the herm expanded to include any bust or statue that merged into a rectangular column as a base, like this herm of Hercules in the 2nd century AD.  Eventually, the male genitals on the side of the herm disappeared, and herms were even made with heads of women, which would have seemed bizarre to the ancient Greeks.  What, no penis?

But the original form of the herm has not been completely forgotten.  This contemporary sculpture by British artist Halliday Avray-Wilson is called Armed Herm.

Tomorrow we'll look at how Hermes became the messenger of the gods.  But the Greeks and Romans didn't completely forget about his phallic origins.

One of the myths about Hermes is that he and the goddess Aphrodite had a son who was named Hermaphroditus after both of them.  Hermaphroditus was the original hermaphrodite: he was part man, from the phallic god Hermes, and part woman, from the goddess of beauty Aphrodite.  Above is a Roman statue of Hermaphroditus from the 2nd century AD, now in the Louvre.

The fresco above was found in Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD.  It is often called a picture of Priapus, the god of erections (the Greeks and Romans had a god for everything).  And yes, this is ancient porn.  The Romans were a lot like us, and they had porn.

But this guy is carrying a caduceus, a staff intertwined with two snakes, which was a symbol of Hermes/Mercury, not Priapus, as we will see tomorrow.  And he has little wings on his ankles, another symbol of Mercury.  So this is probably a porn picture of the phallic god Mercury.