Hermes
/ˈhɜːrmiːz/proper noun
The Greek god of boundaries, roads, trade, thieves and messages, who escorted the dead to the underworld.
The Greek roots
Literally: “he of the stone heap”
The story of the word
The likeliest derivation ties the name to ἕρμα, the cairn of stones that marked a road or a boundary, which is what the god originally was before he acquired a body and winged sandals. Athenians kept square stone pillars called herms outside their doors, and when someone smashed the city's herms overnight in 415 BC it triggered a religious panic that helped wreck the Sicilian expedition. Later Greeks in Egypt merged him with Thoth to make Hermes Trismegistus, patron of alchemy, which is why an airtight jar is hermetically sealed. Whether ἑρμηνεύω, to interpret, belongs to the same family is disputed.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
In a sentence
Hermes gets the job of fetching Persephone back, because no one else can go down and return.