Now We Are Thriai (With Apologies to A A Milne)

In the Hymn to Hermes, there are matters which Apollo cannot share, not even with his new BFF, and the light-fingered nature of his new best friend forces him to be explicit. Hermes is the crosser of boundaries, whose transgressions are not transgressions. Apollo explains that he swore to Zeus that he alone of the other Olympian gods would have access to the will of the Fates via the birds, but offers Hermes a consolation prize in the form of a humbler oracular tradition. Ancient zoologists are notoriously unobservant, but even they agree that bees are not birds despite the ability to fly. Bees and honey appear frequently in the Greek mythological tradition, as animals, as a foodstuff, and as a generic name for doomed young royals such as the unfortunate Princess of Corinth or the original name of Bellerophon. Bees, like birds, form patterns which humans, inveterate pattern-seekers, can interpret as insight against future insecurity. Divination by bee will not incur the wrath of Zeus, because Zeus does not care. This may seem a strange attitude to prognostication from the same god who swore Apollo to eternal secrecy, but perhaps the matters revealed by apiomancy are deemed petty and not worthy of condescension. Hermes' governance of this lesser oracular tradition may be a concession to an older, humbler practice available to those who cannot afford a trip to Delphi, on the same level as plucking flowers in a game of 'she loves me, she loves me not'; but the accuracy of prophecy, whether apiary or avian, is known only to the capricious gods into whose remit it falls. You're definitely not getting your money back.

Hypermetric Verse: No Excuses: Aeneid 2.745-746

 Hypermetic verse, the phenomenon by which one line of dactylic hexameter elides into the next, is a rare enough occurance in Vergil's Aeneid that no example can be dismissed as accidental; therefore its presence in lines 745-6 of Book 2 of the Aeneid merits attention. The lines in question:

Quem non incusavi amens hominumque deorumque,

aut quid in eversa vidi crudelius urbe?

"Who of men and gods did I not accuse,

or what did I not see more cruelly in the fallen city?"

The accusation in question is the fate of Creusa, the wife of Aeneas and mother of Iulus, whom, in a hyperpatriarchal manner, Aeneas bid walk behind him. She did not arrive in the meeting place outside the city. Luca Grillo has commented in his article on how badly Aeneas appears (in his own account!) in comparison to Hector and Orpheus in relationship to his wife. These lines seem to be to crux of it. Not only does Aeneas invite Dido and the audience in Carthage, as well as any readers of Vergil, to consider which individual among gods and men he has not accused, but he does in a couplet using a poetic device that elides, quite literally, one syllable for the one man he has not accused - himself!

The Clever Old Man, Part II: Immortal Gods and Mortal Men

 The Old Man and Zeus are the apices of the "age triangle" in the Hymn to Hermes, The "age triangle" is the trinity of persons necessary to exploring the concept of time within the Hymn. Hermes and Apollo represent new birth and flourishing youth, respectively, but the apex of the triangle must be occupied by an old man, or at least a mature one past the prime of youth. The singer of the Hymn insists the Hermes' activities pertain to both mortals and immortals; Apollo, while not so deeply involved, spends a substantial time on Earth rather than Olympus. The two brothers are so intimately linked that they recieve a mutual epithet: "the very beautiful children." The immortality of the youth and the babe with the power is non-negotiable, forcing the distinction in mortality upon the position of the Elder.; thus the Old Man and Zeus are separate characters.  The appearances of Zeus and the Old Man form a chiastic structure: Zeus is first and last, as befits an immortal, while the Old Man's two appearances are in between. This return to the beginning is a characteristic of epic (here, some might say mock-epic) composition. Whereas Zeus establishes the cosmic arrangement that Hermes and Apollo are literal BFFs, the Old Man represents the mortal, cyclical arrangement of the three Ages of Man. He first meets the Babe, literally born today; next he encounters the Youth; he himself represents Eld, so there is no need for a third encounter. His scope of movement is limited to his plot of land, while the protagonist and antagonist travel the breadth of Greece in pursuit of cattle. The Old Man is also temporally limited by virtue of his mortality: he is old, but the plants he is preparing are very young, younger even than the divine baby Hermes who comments on them. The fruits of the vineyard rise from the earth; yet when the Old Man dies, he will return to the earth. The god who will escort him to the Underworld is Hermes in his role as psychopomp, thereby linking dearh and life in a never-ending cycle.

Zeus' role as the immortal apex involves telic motion rather than cyclical.  He begets Hermes in the beginning of the Hymn, accomplishing his goal. This goal is a pregnancy and a parturition, but the completion of the Twelve Olympians by Hermes' existence, at least in this Hymn, suggests that the will of Zeus is more comprehensive than "mingling in love" with a random goddess. In the latter part of the Hymn, Zeus arbitrates between his two sons by virtue of paternal authority, although he favors Hermes. The judgment and the oaths lock the cosmic "age triangle" into a principle, while the mortal form serves as a guide to mortals who dwell upon the wide earth. Zeus is in Heaven, but the Old Man is who mortals can become.

The Clever Old Man: An Essay on The Hymn to Hermes

 The Homeric Hymn to Hermes is sometimes placed in time between the more serious hymns and the satirical Battle of the Frogs and the Mice. It certainly leans towards a folkloric content while maintaining the format of its more sober brethren! Yet one of the features of epic structure is its flexibility - episodes may be expanded, contracted, or omitted depending on the whims of the audience and performer or broad time restrictions. Shorter and longer Hymns appear within this corpus. In Homeric Hymn 4, the longer and better-known Hymn to Hermes, the interactions of Hermes and Apollo with the Old Man are brief, since the Hymn is about Hermes and Apollo rather than Hermes and mortals; yet the Old Man is the only mortal featured, and the Hymn is insistent on the relationship of Hermes to both immortal gods and mortal Men. If Hermes possesses such important ties to mortals, the Old Man is the only mortal with whom he has any relationship within the Hymn. The Old Man's interaction with Hermes and Apollo, therefore, warrants examination. 

Hermes' interaction with the Old Man is brief; how threatening Hermes' speech is depends on one's perspective, but it is certain that Hermes has instructed the Old Man to pretend he did not see nor hear the things he saw and heard. In many contexts, that would be an instruction to lie, an extraordinary and impossible demand when the Old Man's next encounter with a god is one with the god of prophecy! Yet there is one specific place where falsehood and truth are so bound that one could tread the middle path between the two: a court of law. The interaction between Hermes and Apollo, after all, is a legal comedy. The Greek word used to describe Hermes' account of his actions before the throne of Zeus, the god of oaths as well as the father of the litigants, is not 'alethia', the more common word for truth, but rather 'atrekeos', the meaning of which is more closely 'technically correct'. This meaning of truth is consistent with the Old Man's reply to Apollo's interrogation: the Old Man reveals to Apollo his interaction with Hermes but only claims to have to seemed to see it: a day-old baby driving cattle backwards with Hellenic snowshoes is so surprising that one might well assume it was a hallucination. Many gods would be displeased by this betrayal, but Hermes, as a god of prevarication and precocious cleverness, might admire the quickness of such a mortal. The Old Man's fate is not revealed in the Hymn because this Hymn is about gods rather than Men. Yet in a version of Hermes' deeds in a less high register, one in which the role of Hermes as guide of Men took precedence over Olympian sibling rivalry, the Old Man's role would become pivotal.

The key lies in the exact word Apollo uses when he asks the Old Man if he has seen anyone rustling his cattle: he uses the word 'anera'. This term means either 'mortal', as in 'King of Men and Gods' or 'adult male'. In casual speech, the difference between 'anera' and 'tina' 'who' would be trivial, but this is a legal comedy, and in legal matters much that is trivial elsewhere attains significance. When Apollo asks the Old Man whether he has seen an 'anera', the Old Man can answer in the negative because Hermes is not a mortal nor is he an adult male. This level of semantics is not unique to the origin of Hermes: Apollo, who is consistently referred to as 'son of Leto' in the Hymn, was born on a floating island due to Hera's restrictions on Leto's place of parturition, while Zeus was hidden in a cradle hung from the ceiling so that he was technically neither in heaven nor on earth nor in the sea. The Old Man, in order to keep up with the gods of the Hymn, must operate on a commensurate level. 

A focus on the Old Man in the Hymn to Hermes is inconsistent with the general structure of the Homeric Hymns, which privilege the experiences of immortals. This privilege obscures the importance of the Old Man to the Hymn and his potential centrality to a telling of the story in a less elevated register. The framing of the Hymn as a legal comedy restores this element, or, if the material was lowbrow in origin, preserves some small portion in the august halls of Homeric epic.